Icelebrated my birthday alone at my office.
Thursday, midnight, is almost the moment at which I was born thirty years ago. Thursday night is a glorious night in our quarter: in the alleyways, lanes, and streets of Tulun the women now take to their beds, they sprawl out on the sheets, with their legs raised high in the air, while the men push their way into them, entering the welcoming bodies and coming out, happy and delighted. The beds creak and screech, and the voices of the women are raised in screams of sexual excitement and ecstasy, while the spirits of the men are stimulated with joy at their masculine potency. A fleeting summer furnishes the quarter with a comforting warmth throughout this cold winter night; then, at dawn, in delight the satisfied women throw down from the windows and balconies of their homes the water in which they and their husbands have bathed, thus cleansing the streets of dirt.
In our house it was the same, and on a night such as this my father and mother did it thirty years ago. They didn’t content themselves with this. In fact, my mother was continually reminding me of the merit of Thursdays, for she became devoted to me on a radiant night of passion and she brought me into the world while people around her were making love all over Tulun. My mother was very cruel, a stranger to nature and temperament, and unfeelingly she would remind me of my function as a man; it was as though she were saying to me, “A real man is not afraid of murderers and dogs, and isn’t scared of women, my dear sir.”
In the bedroom I put on my heavy wool suit with the red tie as I hummed to myself and danced where I stood. I put on some sexy Gucci cologne as I gave myself a broad smile in the mirror, saying softly, “Many happy returns, man.”
While I was crossing the drawing room to the office Salwa was in the bathroom, drenched in shampoo, soap, hot water, and steam, and she was singing to herself. I went into the room and locked myself in. I sat at my small wooden desk on the revolving leather chair and took out from the drawer in the desk a bottle of Polonaki 84. Opening it with my teeth, I began to gulp down my first glassful, slowly, taking my time. I was clasping the glass in the palms of my hands and drinking. I could hear the mumbled crooning that came to me from the bathroom. I was staring at the shelves of books that covered most of the walls of the room, while whispering to myself, “You’re now old enough to become a real man. You mustn’t wait for anything or anyone.”
I slowly gulped down more of the cheap wine, having nothing particular in mind. I opened the study window that overlooked the square and the Tulun Mosque. Despite the darkness I could clearly make out the tall, ancient minaret, strongly erect, a giant stake cleaving the emptiness of the sky. The vast square surrounding the mosque was empty, with the wind whistling inside it. Gently it began to rain in Tulun, nobody was outside. I raised my face to the sky and smiled at the rain, while Salwa’s snoring began to come to me from our bedroom, like accompanying music. Her snoring grew louder and in time and harmony with my progressive drinking. Closing the window, I went back to staring at the shelves of books. I realized that I was happy being on my own and celebrating by myself, feeling good that she had forgotten me and had gone to sleep.
After three or four hours—I don’t know which—I finished off the bottle. Having filled my body with alcohol, my head was spinning. With difficulty I rose from where I was and staggered toward the door and opened it. I fell to my knees in the sitting room, but eventually reached the bedroom. I stumbled about in the darkness till I reached the large bed. I pulled off my tie and lay down in the double bed, still wearing my suit, my cologne, and my drunkenness, stretching myself out alongside her like a happy man killed in battle.
We hadn’t had sex for a long time. We would merely stretch out in the bed together side by side, touching only by chance, each of us sleeping in our own clearly defined space and domain. Slipping under the blanket, I had a sensation of warmth flowing through my body.
Suddenly it occurred to me that it would be good for me to begin my new year with an enjoyable bit of sex. She was sleeping on her side and had her back to me. Her body was plump and fully stretched out, her breathing warm. From behind I stretched out my hand toward the two pomegranates resting on her chest. Her skin was warm and she was—unusually for her—completely naked under the blanket. Her chest rose and fell; her breathing was regular and I understood from the way she was completely naked, without even her nightdress, that it was a celebration, an invitation, and an expression of desire. Slowly, gently, I touched her torso with the palms of my hands, then the roundness of her buttocks. From inside her dreams she shouted out angrily, “That man’s a good-for-nothing—he’s not a man at all.” She continued her regular breathing and went back into a deep sleep. I no longer felt like doing anything, so I didn’t try again with her.
I was stretched out on my back, my eyes staring up at the ceiling with my thing dead between my thighs.
I placed a long pillow between my arms and went on rocking myself like a mother talking gently to her baby so as to send it to sleep.
I didn’t sleep.
Scenes from the past, scenes I thought I had forgotten forever, assailed me.
I see myself now: I am this pale boy whose mother, delighted at the sight of him, said to him, “God protect you. When you were in your swaddling clothes, he who feared God wouldn’t look into your face.” She used to comb my hair and gaze at me admiringly as I put on my new school uniform for the first time.
He is me, a boy of a pale complexion rare among the boys of the quarter, with the exception of Abdel Rahman, the cousin of Fawzi the grocer. He was of the same height as me and was similarly fair complexioned, both in his features and the color of his hair. People couldn’t tell us apart. They would call out to me, “We’ll say to your father. ‘What have you to do with dogs. O Abdel Rahman, you dog,” And I’d flee from their angry, annoyed faces. Out of breath. I’d run to our house.
Abdel Rahman had a strange passion for dogs and a tremendous passion for wandering around the alleys, lanes, and empty lots of Tulun at night without the fears the rest of us had. He had a large, ugly black dog that would pick quarrels with the other male dogs in the quarter, biting them and scaring them, and would leap onto the backs of the females. One day the dog returned from his usual daily run around, bleeding from his nose, and with wounds to his chest and a fractured skull. Abdel Rahman didn’t cry as we used to about many things. He merely grasped hold of the dog, clasping it to his chest and covered up the wound with his hands until his mother came along with some coffee grounds, at which he left the dog with her. He stood on his feet like a grown-up man and stared down at the blood from his dog that was spreading across his white gallabiya. He told the gang of kids who were gathered around him that the criminal who had tried to kill his beloved dog was just a dog himself and that he’d take revenge on all aggressive dogs, and on evil people too.
The lads say that grown-ups only swear at Abdel Rahman by calling him a son of a bitch because his mother in her youth loved a large black dog and was intimate with it behind Fawzi’s back.
When I recounted this in front of her, my mother said “Shame on you, she’s a poor woman and she’s not all that well.” When she’d given birth to Abdel Rahman she had no milk in her breasts and he refused to drink processed milk and would vomit it out until she saw him crawling toward their female dog, which was lying down on the tiles of the lounge. He pushed his way among the puppies that were suckling from the mother dog. The dog didn’t reject him but looked at him with tender affection. Abdel Rahman’s mother resigned herself to God’s will and started to pay attention to the dog’s diet, providing it with milk, meat, and oily foods, foods that Fawzi the grocer doesn’t eat. Abdel Rahman was well fed and grew up loving dogs, especially black ones that had a resemblance to the bitch they owned.
Three days after disappearing from the streets of Tulun and staying in the house of Fawzi the grocer, with all of us thinking that we had seen the last of it forever, the black dog made its appearance once again, being led along by Abdel Rahman. It looked to me as though it had recovered from its wounds and had got back its frightening appearance and its viciousness.
In front of his father’s shop Abdel Rahman had given his dog a bath with rose water and scented soap, all this under the gaze of the children who had gathered around him to watch the spectacle. He placed a new red leather collar around its neck and covered its back with a piece of white cloth decorated with flowers and trees. He had also placed under its belly a shiny yellow piece of tape, after which he had led his dog very gently by its lead to its usual place in the mosque’s square. He embraced his dog, patting it affectionately, kissing it on the head and saying to it, “Praise be to God for your well-being, you bridegroom. Just a minute and I’ll be back.”
Abdel Rahman went into his father’s storeroom and brought out one of the many empty sheet metal barrels that used to hold oil. He rolled it along the ground and set it up in the square alongside the dog, which was squatting grandly on its hindquarters. Abdel Rahman poured two buckets of water, bottles of rose water, and two blocks of ice into the barrel, and the news of all this quickly spread throughout the quarters, lanes, and alleyways.
People ran to the square in hordes.
Abdel Rahman tied the ends of his gallabiya around his waist and began ladling the rose water out of the barrel with a tin mug and giving a long file of young boys and girls, women and old men something to drink. He would say to each one, “Drink. Drink. By the Holy Quran, in the name of all the dogs of the quarter. Enjoy it.”
If someone asked for another mug of the drink he’d hand it over with the words, “Good health to you. By my mother’s life I’ll not leave a single dog, the son of a dog, in this place. Drink. Drink.”
In a mere two days Abdel Rahman had performed what he had sworn he would do; not a single one of the twenty dogs in the quarter was left alive: they were all stretched out in the various alleys and lanes groaning and twisting about in pain till they passed out, while we looked on, delighting in playing about with their bodies. One of the good men in our quarter made his appearance and started swearing at us and chasing us away as he clapped his hands together, saying, “There is no god but God,” and he’d remove the new corpse to the vast square in front of the mosque and pour kerosene over the dog and set it alight.
The square became a great crematorium with smoke and the smell of burning corpses rising up from it.
When people accused me of poisoning the dogs I cried and ran away from the square in terror. I called to my mother, who had come out to the window and was shouting out to God to change the devil of a boy, Abdel Rahman, into a monkey, as I bounded up the stairs, She was still angry as she leaned out of the window and heaped curses on Abdel Rahman and the good-for-nothing kids and the dogs. I embraced her from behind, sobbing and trembling. She turned around and took me into a warm embrace, and went on patting me on the back, saying, “For shame the man has no fear—he doesn’t even cry.”
Abdel Rahman was always viciously frightening.
At this moment I see him, with the eye of memory and imagination, standing in his place in the large square in front of the mosque; in his right hand he has a short rope with which he holds the black dog; on his fair face there’s an awesomely sly smile, a smile that can only issue from a heart that is dead and black. He is making his way to where the boys and girls are so as to amuse himself with them. Because of the terror I had for him and his dog, I would avoid him by going around the high wall of the Tulun mosque. I would hurry along, looking around me, my body trembling in fear, my hand resting on the piasters in the side pocket of my gallabiya. I’d scurry around, running the long distance till I reached the bakery. Having bought the loaves for my family, I’d hide them under my gallabiya and return to my mother, happy that I had escaped the insolence of Abdel Rahman.
Many years later Abdel Rahman narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose when his lawyer was able to prove that he was defending himself when he fatally stabbed the butcher, Awad, in a quarrel over money—ten pounds to be exact.
I didn’t hate anyone as much as I hated Abdel Rahman and his black dog. Abdel Rahman was a murderer and his dog was unclean and scary.
Were you a real man if you were still worried about Abdel Rahman and his dog, while lying stretched out alongside your wife’s naked body?
I woke up because of the sunlight that had suddenly filled the room as Salwa drew the curtains to the bedroom, deliberately making a noise as she called out. “Wake up . . . wake up. It’s afternoon—it’s three o’clock, you blockhead!”
I mumbled in exasperation. Turning my back on her. I moved about in the bed until I became warm, with my head on a small pillow, my knees up against my chest, and my body in my preferred fetal position. At that moment I wished that I could just go back into the womb I’d come from.