“I notice that all the portraits are of women.”
“Women are the essence of everything,” he said warmly. “They are the starting point. Women are life.”
For the first time, I noticed a bottle of whiskey and a glass on the small table next to the desk and realized that his exuberance was aided by alcohol. He gestured for me to wait. “I want to show you something I hope you’ll like.”
He brought out two photographs, both the same size. I noticed that they were of the same subject—a pretty woman of approximately forty with black hair and wearing a leather jacket. He laid the two photographs side by side on the desk and laughed, saying, “Kamel, you’re a poet. I’m sure you’ll understand what I’m driving at. I took these two photographs of the same woman, two hours apart. Can you see any difference? Take your time before you answer.”
The woman had the same pose and the same smile in both photographs.
“The details are the same in both images,” I said.
“I don’t mean the details. Concentrate a little. Don’t you think that her facial expression is different?”
I carried on examining the photographs. The prince continued in a serious tone of voice, “If we hypothesize that the woman’s psychological state is different in the photographs, in which one, would you say, does she appear more contented?”
I pointed to one of the photographs, and he cried out, “Well done! And do you know why she seems happier?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then come with me,” he said with a jovial gesture for me to follow him. We went out onto the balcony. There were plants and flowers everywhere. He went over to a flower pot and said, “This is a thirsty rose. Take a good look at it. Engrave its features in your mind.”
I gazed at the rose as the prince darted off and then came back with a watering can. I’ll admit that his behavior seemed a little odd to me. Might he have some psychological problem or a slight mental imbalance? I put the thought out of my mind immediately and continued watching him water the rose. He smiled. “I want you to observe the rose now that I have watered it. Don’t you see that it is satisfied? The tension has gone. It is at ease.”
I nodded in agreement.
“If you go and look at the two photographs now, you’ll see the same difference. I photographed the woman before and after lovemaking. I took a picture of her the moment she arrived at the studio. Then I made love to her and took another photograph.”
I felt embarrassed. But he wore a mischievous grin as he said, “I should add that I am quite good at it…”
He chuckled at that, and I couldn’t help laughing too. I spent two hours with him. As we ate, he drank his way through a bottle of wine, and then we went back onto the balcony. We spoke of everything, art, love and poetry. I told him about my family and my dreams.
Suddenly he blurted out, “Do you know, Kamel, I am not actually Egyptian. My father is Turkish and my mother’s Spanish. I was born in Italy in a city called San Remo. I came to Egypt when I was two. Despite that, I feel as Egyptian as you are. I often ask myself what has made me love Egypt so much, and, believe me, I can’t come up with a specific answer. Everything in Europe is on a higher level than in Egypt. The streets there are cleaner, and everything is elegant and shiny. But Egypt exerts its ineffable pull. The best thing about Egypt is its soul, and that’s something you can’t put your finger on.”
“The Egypt you love,” I said ruefully, “is occupied and humiliated.”
“That won’t last forever. It will pass. This is a country that has given civilization to the world for thousands of years. Egypt will be victorious, and she will regain her independence.”
“But how can we bring down the empire upon which the sun never sets?”
“History teaches that the strongest empires are brought down by the powerless.”
“Sometimes I feel that those words are just theoretical.”
“No, Kamel. That’s the truth. The will of the people cannot be resisted forever. Thanks to what you and your colleagues are doing, the English will soon discover that their occupation of Egypt is costing them more than they can afford, and they will have to leave eventually.”
That last sentence shocked me. How did the prince know what I was up to? We sat in silence for a while, and then he added, “I should like you to visit me from time to time.”
“That would be a great honor, sir.”
That was the signal that our visit had come to an end. I got up and told the prince that I should be going. He shook my hand at the studio door and with a warm smile told me, “Listen, Kamel. From now on, consider me your friend.”
“I am honored by that, sir.”
As I turned to leave, he suddenly added, “I forgot to tell you. There’s an English girl who needs lessons to improve her Arabic. Do you have any time to help her?”
“I have never taught anyone before.”
“But you are a poet, and your Arabic is good. She needs only a few hours’ help a week.”
I said nothing. He put his hand on my shoulder, and still smiling, asked, “Do you agree then?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Bravo! Tomorrow at nine a.m. go and see Mr. Wright. The student you’ll be teaching is his daughter, Mitsy. I have arranged everything with him.”
18
As they carried out the corpse of Abd el-Aziz Gaafar, his wife, Umm Said, and his daughter, Saleha, sobbed. Their neighbor Aisha, Ali Hamama’s wife, let out piercing wails that reverberated throughout the building and reached the ears of the people in the street. Then she rushed over and threw herself onto the coffin. When the other mourners pulled her away, she started slapping her cheeks so violently that the women had to restrain her before she hurt herself. It was in this, and in other ways, that Aisha showed her sympathy for the family of the deceased. She had offered her flat to the scores of mourners who had turned up from Cairo and Upper Egypt. Throughout the mourning period, she never once left the family of the deceased even for a day. She cooked for them every day in her flat, sending her daughter, Fayeqa, over with the food, instructing her to give Umm Said any help she needed. In fact, Fayeqa did much of their housework, doing the wash and hanging it out to dry, sweeping and mopping the floor, scouring the water jars, before refilling them, adding a few drops of rosewater and lining them up to cool on the window ledge. She aired the cushions, sheets and bedspreads in the sunshine. And after all that, she even fed the chickens, which Umm Said kept on the roof, cleaning the coop every Friday. But was Aisha’s great sympathy for the family of the bereaved devoid of an ulterior motive?
This is a difficult question to answer, because Aisha was well known in the street for her compassion, being the first to help anyone who needed it. On the other hand, the way Aisha stood solidly by Umm Said during her ordeal had another inescapable effect. Fayeqa, spending most of the day cleaning in the house of the deceased, had fallen in completely with the appearance of mourning: yet her unadorned, simple black robe was somehow tight enough to show off her tempting curves and short enough, falling just below knee level, to reveal the gleaming paleness of her calves (particularly when she was sitting). Fayeqa had stopped putting on her regular makeup and made do with a hint of kohl around her eyes, a dab of powder on her cheeks and a touch of red on her luscious lips, though this minimal application somehow made her look more radiant than ever. Instead of painting her nails bright red, she used an almost transparent varnish, so her hands and feet looked far too beautifully manicured to do mundane, menial jobs. In short, Fayeqa’s mourning guise in no way detracted from her beauty; on the contrary, it somehow only enhanced her loveliness and allure. Fayeqa looked as if she were performing a scene in which grief was mixed with beauty, sadness with seduction.
It was a moving performance, watched closely by one person—Said Gaafar, who came home from school every afternoon to find Fayeqa walking around with a tray of food or setting the table. As much as he tried, he could not stop watching her quivering bosom,
which for so long had afforded him unforgettable pleasure. Said would eat something quickly and then take a nap. When he woke up, he would find Fayeqa in the kitchen washing the dishes, or he would watch her leaning out of the window as she hung the laundry. Then his imagination would run wild with obscenely tantalizing images. At first Said would remember his dead father, feel embarrassed and suffer pangs of conscience. He would make an effort to avert his gaze from Fayeqa’s body, but his passion raged on inside him, completely overcoming his misgivings and exciting him until it was painful. The mere presence of Fayeqa aroused him, never mind seeing her walk back and forth around the apartment, causing the blood to drain from his face, turning his vision blurry until it was all he could do not to pounce on her from behind. When she spoke, the playful tone and cadence of her mellifluous voice kept him from understanding her words. Even when she asked God to have mercy on his father, her lips half opened and closed again so sensually that he could think only of kissing her. Said had not touched Fayeqa since she had blown her top and left him on the roof. He had tried time and time again to talk to her after that, but she had stubbornly refused. One day, an opportunity arose when he was alone with her in the kitchen.
“Fayeqa,” he whispered, panting with lust and excitement. “I’m going up to the roof. Please come. I need to talk to you.”
She gave him a stone-cold look. “Go up on the roof? And do what, Said? What do you take me for? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The rebuke was harsh, but he registered something in her voice that gave him hope. He asked again and received a second refusal but slightly less harsh than the first. He started pleading with her as she continued to refuse, then became angry and confused, finally hesitant and grudgingly agreeing. She followed him up the stairs and stood a little way from him on the roof. When he tried to get closer, she drew away and told him, “Keep your distance.”
He did not appear to hear. He seemed to be hypnotized or perhaps possessed as he stepped closer. As she pummeled his chest, her beautiful kohl-lined eyes staring out at him fiercely, she said, “If you touch me, I’ll scream till the house comes down.”
His face drooped, and in a broken, pitiful voice, he asked her, “Why are you being so hard on me, Fayeqa?”
“I’m doing the right thing.”
“I love you.”
Fayeqa leaned back a little, bit her lip, raised her left eyebrow and then sighed, “ ‘I love you’? What bank can I deposit that in?”
Her callousness aroused him again, and he whispered hoarsely, “Let me hold you one more time.”
“Not a chance.”
“Just for my sake.”
“Listen, buster! I made a mistake with you and I have repented. If you think I’m going to lower myself again, you have another thing coming.”
“Fayeqa.”
“A respectable man enters a house through the door.”
She uttered the sentence with finality. Then she turned to go back down the stairs, but Said called after her, “Just one minute. I want to talk to you.”
Fayeqa shrugged and said, “The time for talking is over, Said.”
He watched her walk away. The sight of Fayeqa going down the stairs was, without exaggeration, a living masterpiece, perfectly uniting the elements of sound, sight and rhythm. Her house shoes, clacking against her feet as she walked, sounded like the ostinato of a virtuoso tabla player. With every step she took, her body undulated in three different directions: her heavy thighs rubbed together with a slight swishing sound, her full breasts imprisoned in her robe wobbled and announced their overweening presence, and her large and luscious backside heaved from side to side as evenly as an enormous pendulum. Fayeqa’s backside was so undeniably unique in its contours and contents that the particulars could fill up pages. Her backside, so soft and full of vitality, seemed, in its perpetual motion and in the scores of delightful and seductive poses it struck, to possess a life of its own. Fayeqa’s body burbled like an active volcano, exuding such strong waves of desire in the direction of Said that he turned to jelly. He spent sleepless nights tossed by swells of such violent passion until he could take no more, and one evening he finally went to talk to his mother. She was sitting on the sofa fingering her green amber prayer beads. Said burst into her bedroom with a hurried greeting before sitting down next to her. “Mother, I want to talk to you about something.”
He seemed excited and impatient, desperate to unburden himself.
“What is it, son?” she asked smiling.
“I want to propose to Fayeqa, Ali Hamama’s daughter.”
“Propose what to Fayeqa?”
“I mean, I want to get engaged to her and marry her.”
Umm Said sighed and set her prayer beads down. “Good Lord above. You’ve gone mad. Your father is not yet cold, and you want to get married?”
Said tried to calm her down, but she became even angrier, shouting, “You should be ashamed of yourself! Is this any way to carry on?”
When they heard her, Kamel and Saleha rushed into the bedroom to see what was going on. Said told Saleha to get back to her own room, but Kamel stayed to hear the story. He looked at his brother. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that you are thinking about marriage right now. Can’t you wait a year?”
“Shut up, Kamel,” Said shouted at him. “It’s none of your business.”
“And how is it none of my business? It’s not right for you, and it’s not right for Fayeqa’s family. How could Ali Hamama agree to your marrying his daughter when we are still in the period of mourning for our father?”
Said, aware of the seriousness of the matter, tried as hard as he could to suppress his anger. “Fayeqa’s family,” he replied, “don’t know anything about this.”
At this point, his mother cried out, “Listen, my boy, are you a fool, or do you take us all for idiots?”
Said listened silently as his mother harangued him until she sank back, exhausted, sobbing quietly. Staring at Kamel, Said said, “Mother, I’d like to speak to you alone.”
“Your brother is not a stranger,” Umm Said mumbled, her face wet with tears. Kamel, however, stood up and said, “I’ll leave you two alone, Mother.”
After Kamel had shut the door behind him, Said went over to his mother, kissed her head and hands and sat down beside her to lay out his case. He told her that he would rather die than displease his mother. He promised that he would always be her faithful son who sat at her feet waiting for her blessing. But, for the life of him, he could not understand what had made her so angry? He had not committed any sin or broken the civil or religious law. He just wanted to get married. Marriage in itself was not a crime or an offense to the religion, and he was twenty-three. Wasn’t that a good age for marriage? Did not the most noble of all beings (here Umm Said mumbled praise on the Prophet) himself say in words that are recorded to this day, “He among you who is capable should marry”? In Islam you are encouraged to marry young, and thank God we are Muslims. Anyway, in a few days’ time, he would graduate from the vocational school with a diploma. He had already agreed to take a job in Tanta, please God, and thus he would be able to support his own household and not cost the family a penny. Did his darling mother want him to live alone in a strange town, without a wife to look after him? He explained that it was not as if, God forbid, he was trying to foist a stranger upon the family.
“It’s Fayeqa, daughter of Ali Hamama, the neighbors who are almost family to us already. It’s Fayeqa,” he told his mother, “who has been as distraught over our loss as we children are. It’s Fayeqa, who has not left your side for a day, who has served you like a daughter. After everything she has done for us, doesn’t she deserve something? After all, Mother, you are an Upper Egyptian, brought up to want things correct and proper. You don’t like things to be off-kilter. Is it right for Fayeqa to come in and out of our flat when, according to religious law, Kamel and Mahmud and I should not be in the same room with her? Wouldn’t it be more proper if I were to marry her
under the law of God and his Prophet before the wagging tongues, which you know there are in our street, start wagging? Is that such a problem, Mother?”
Umm Said was lying on the sofa and had stopped crying. When she gave no response, Said plucked up his courage and continued enthusiastically, “I know what the problem is, Mother. You feel that my marriage before a year has passed is wrong because it is against the conventions of mourning. But marriage in itself, Mother, is not a form of rejoicing. It is at the party after the wedding where the rejoicing takes place, but I can marry Fayeqa without a party. Neither Fayeqa nor I nor her family want to violate the period of mourning for our father. I will marry her quietly, Mother. No party, no ululations, no tambourines and no belly dancer. God forbid, I should have anything like that! All I want is for the fatiha to be read now and in a week or two for us to sign the marriage contract so that we can go be together in an apartment I’m going to rent in Tanta.”
Said continued this refrain until his mother finally conceded. The following day, at dawn, Aisha was surprised by a visit from Umm Said. After kissing and hugging each other, drinking coffee and exchanging some chitchat, Umm Said gave Aisha a serious look and said, “Tell me, sister. Your daughter, Fayeqa. Has anyone been asking after her in marriage?”
“She’s still young, Umm Said.”
“Wonderful. I want her for my son Said.”
Before Aisha could react to the surprise, Umm Said went on, “But there is one condition. And remember the proverb, ‘Without a proviso, no happy ending.’ ”
“Proviso?” asked Aisha, bemused, looking with cautious curiosity at Umm Said, who was sitting back in her chair.
“If it is Said’s fate to have Fayeqa, you need to know our circumstances. Our sorrow over Abd el-Aziz will never end. Not in a hundred years. Our tradition is to stay in mourning for a year, and in Upper Egypt we consider any celebration during the mourning period scandalous and shocking.”