Friendly Fire Read online

  I looked at him in exasperation and was on the verge of calling him names and ordering him to make the coffee and let whatever might happen happen when I thought better of it, lit a cigarette, and went back to reading.

  That night I stayed awake until the call for the dawn prayer was given. I was so furious I couldn’t get to sleep. The idea that that animal Sa‘id should evaluate my conduct and control my behavior, and that the ignoramuses and servants of the department should treat me cheekily, filled me with gall.

  The morning of the following day, I determined on a course of action. I asked the maid, Huda, to make me a thermos full of coffee, took the flask under my arm, and marched in, ready for a fight. On reaching my room, I found stuck up on the door a piece of paper on which I read, “Gentlemen members of the Research Department are kindly requested to refrain from partaking of drinks during the month of Exalted Ramadan out of respect for the feelings of those fasting. Signed: The Administration.” I recognized Dr. Sa‘id’s handwriting so I put out my hand, tore the piece of paper violently down, squashed it into a ball, and threw it on the floor, looking around in search of one of them with whom to initiate battle, but the corridor was deserted. I went into the office, poured myself a cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette. I tried to read the newspapers but was incapable of concentrating I was so excited. I could sense the coming confrontation and was trying to hasten it along. I would teach that mule a lesson he’d never forget, I thought to myself, and I pictured myself throwing him to the ground and my shoe pummeling his bald head with kicks until the blood flowed.

  After half an hour I heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor and soon Dr. Sa‘id appeared at the door to the room, Abd el-Alim behind him. Sa‘id looked at the cigarette in my hand and said in a loud voice, “What’s this, Isam? What’s going on? This is quite unacceptable.”

  “What’s unacceptable?” I asked him in a voice shaking with excitement.

  Dr. Sa‘id’s voice rose even higher.

  “My dear friend, ‘If you must do ill, then conceal yourselves.’ Are you or are you not a Muslim?”

  “Not.”

  “What?” Dr. Sa‘id said in astonishment.

  “Didn’t you just ask me if I’m a Muslim? Now I’ve told you—I’m not. I am not a Muslim.”

  “So what are you?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  A moment of silence elapsed. Then Sa‘id advanced a few steps and his voice rang out in fury: “No, now you’ve gone too far. Listen to me, my fine friend. I don’t intend to get into a slanging match with you out of respect for the Noble Month, but just remember you’re talking to your administrative director. Do you understand me?”

  My body was quivering with rage and I said nothing but I stood up and stared into his face with fury, while he smiled mockingly, wagged a finger at me, and said, “Plus, can you tell me why a big boy like you can’t manage to fast?”

  “He’s sure to have a valid excuse, doctor!”* exclaimed one of the employees who had gathered behind Dr. Sa‘id,

  and a few laughs rang out. I was so angry I lost my wits and found myself striking the thermos, which fell to the ground making a great clatter, and the top came off and the coffee poured out over the floor. The employees took a few steps back and were startled into silence, and I shouted with the full force of my anger, “You make fun of me, you imbeciles? You understand nothing.”

  My outburst took them aback for a moment, and then the same employee, who was called Ahmad Guda, called out, “Of course not. You’re the one that knows it all, Mr. Know-It-All.”

  Some of those who were standing there laughed and Guda clapped his hands and said, in a silly, drawn out voice, “Mr. Knoooooooow-It-All!” The raucous laughter grew and I yelled at them, my voice lost in the noise, “Go ahead! Laugh! I’ve read more about Islam than any of you.”

  They didn’t listen to me and the laughter continued. I got the impression that the way I looked when I was shouting at them increased their mirth, and my indignation flared back up and I screamed at them, “Idiots! Trash!”

  The laughter came to an immediate stop. Whispers ran around and Dr. Sa‘id exclaimed, coming up to me, “Shut your mouth!”

  “Shut your own mouth, you animal! You’re just trash and you know nothing!”

  They were shocked. Silence reigned for a moment. Then suddenly Abd el-Alim rushed at me, hand raised, and screamed hoarsely, “Blasphemer! Dog!”

  All I have after that is confused impressions. Abd el-Alim launched himself at me and I tried to slap him on the face but my hand missed and hit his neck. He grabbed me by my shirt and started shouting abuse at me and the employees separated us and dragged me by force out of the room, Dr. Sa‘id’s deep voice following me as he shouted, “See, he’s a communist! A communist! I had my suspicions from the beginning. Refer him for investigation immediately!”

  5

  To look at, a drop of water is as pure and transparent as crystal, but if you magnify it under a lens, a thousand impurities appear. The moon is beautiful and unsullied as long as it’s far away, but if you get close it looks like a filthy, deserted beach. Even the face of the one you love, whose fresh, rosy complexion captivates your heart, appears—as soon as you have learned to see it properly—like ugly, wrinkled cloth. You can test this truth every time. Our love of beauty is merely a trick produced by the way we look, and the broader the vision grows the clearer the wrinkles are seen.

  6

  Our house—forties style; high, decorated ceilings; large floor tiles with small squares, their colors worn away by people’s feet; sedate wooden furniture with an old smell; chair covers and table cloths whose color had changed and which had worn through in several places from age. Our house had spacious echoing rooms, large balconies looking out over the street and other, narrower ones, at the sides, a large bathroom for the masters and another small one, tucked away, for the servants and emergencies, and two separate entrances—one for the family and another that opened directly onto the sitting room, which my father had turned into his studio. Everything in our house invoked a rich former life that was now on its last legs. After my father’s death, I moved into his studio. I left everything as it was—the paintings stacked next to the wall, the cans of paint, the palette, the little stool, the place where the friends had sat, the small cushions and the rug; even the goza, the brazier, and the bags of charcoal I left in their places. All I did was to make myself a space in the far corner of the room, where I set up a camp bed to sleep on. Each night, before closing them, my eyes would roam over the studio. It was my father’s place and I could feel his presence in a vague but definite way. I slept next to his things to guard them. When, one day, he came back, he would find everything as he had left it and I would go back to my old room. My sick mother slept in one room in the apartment and in another my grandmother, who was over eighty. The maid Huda would put her bedding down in the passage between the two rooms, hugging her baby girl, and sleep. Huda had married a plumber who had gone to Iraq to work two years previously and no more had been heard of him, so she had returned to our house to serve us. My uncle—my mother’s only brother—had spent ten years in Saudi Arabia and therefore supported us all—me, my mother, my grandmother, Huda, and her daughter. We were a tight-knit family in the old style, but I drew close and saw.

  7

  I returned one day from the department to find my mother silent and anxious.

  When I questioned her closely, she cried and said that she was afraid but wouldn’t elaborate. Huda made a sign to me behind her back and took me aside in the kitchen and informed me that my mother was afraid because she had a lump in her chest. The swelling had appeared several months earlier but she’d decided to tell no one and had tried to treat it on her own. She’d tried everything. She’d rubbed her chest with dough, she’d put a poultice on it, and she’d dressed it with water and sugar. She’d even taken birth-control pills, on the advice of a woman living nearby, and in the end, when these metho
ds had failed, my mother had decided to ignore the swelling—to talk, laugh, get mad, and live as though it didn’t exist. A faint hope told her that she would wake up one morning and discover that the swelling had disappeared as suddenly as it had come. In vain, however. The swelling had come precisely to stay, invade, and spread, and when it reached her neck and this puffed up and became covered with blue lines, it became impossible to hide or ignore it.

  In the evening, the doctor’s clinic was crowded with patients and their families. I could distinguish the sick from their relatives at one glance, not just from their pallor and fatigue but from their eyes, which had an absent look and seemed to be covered by a cloud, as though, when they looked in your direction, they saw something behind you—something obscure that only became visible a little before death.

  The doctor was a professor of oncology and at the same time a brigadier general in the armed forces and religious (in the middle of his forehead there was a black mark caused by his prostrating himself and touching his head to the ground in prayer, while over his head on the wall was the Throne Verse done in beautiful gilded script). After examining my mother carefully, he went back to his desk and opened the conversation with the words “In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Then, bowing his head so that his eyes shouldn’t meet hers, he said to my mother, “Hagga, you are a believer in God, and the Almighty has said in his Noble Book, Naught shall visit us but what God has prescribed for us (God has spoken the truth). I am sorry to have to tell you that you are afflicted with widespread malignant tumors. We call this type ‘fourth-degree’ and, unfortunately, they cannot be removed surgically. We place great hope in chemotherapy and yet greater hope in God, Almighty and Glorious.”

  In college, my professors used to conduct their experiments on rats, after first killing them. When the rat’s turn came and the professor’s huge hand, enclosed in its white glove, stretched down into the cage to grab it, it would try desperately to escape from his grip; and when it finally failed and the hand got a good grip on it and brought it out of the cage to kill it, the rat would let out an intermittent screech and spontaneously void its bowels. My mother screamed in the doctor’s clinic and beat her cheeks and threw herself on the floor and the doctor and I only succeeded in calming her after some effort. He wrote out a list of tests and medications and I went home with her in a taxi. I didn’t speak on the way back but gathered from a flash of light on her face in the darkness and from a sob that escaped her that she was crying. As soon as we reached the house, my mother phoned her brother Abbas; as she told him an expression of anguish sketched itself on her face that never again left her.

  Months of treatment went by. My mother’s body grew emaciated, her breasts were altogether destroyed, her skin darkened, and her hair fell out, but the anguish never left her eyes for a second. A sense of foreboding that could not be stilled took possession of her and she came to be dominated by a single idea—that she must drive death away at any price, escape the looming grasp, and live. I read once that when an elephant feels it is going to die, it walks to the place it has chosen to be its grave. There the elephant stops and calmly awaits its end. What nobler thing is there than to be brave and never snap? I was my mother’s only son and she loved me, I know; and I also know that if she were to choose between my death and her total cure, she would choose my death, unhesitatingly—and let it sadden her afterward as it might, so long as she was safe and sound.

  My mother’s terror of death left her with no concern to spare for anything else. When my uncle Abbas came to visit us, she would go to even greater lengths to show off her weakness and powerlessness. She would make up to him, passionately praying to God on his behalf that He increase his wealth and preserve his children. She would caress his chest with her hands in false affection and yell angrily into my face—since what then could be my worth?—that I’d left the window open and the cold air might do my uncle harm. When he got up to leave, my mother would burst into tears and tell him that she was afraid all the nagging by ‘the bastards’ (meaning his wife) would one day harden his heart against her. At this my uncle would smile, bend over and kiss her brow, produce from his pocket the envelope of money that he had got ready beforehand, and then whisper to her anxiously as he thrust the envelope under her pillow, “Whatever happens, please don’t say anything to my wife Hikmat about my coming to see you because you know she’s getting old and bad tempered and I don’t need more problems.”

  I was having sex with the maid Huda. Desire would gnaw at me, playing such havoc with my nerves that I would forget the smell of sweat emanating from her body, her thick, coarse hands, and her ugly, brown, cracked toenails. I’d call her and she’d know what I wanted from my tone of voice and come to my room, closing the door behind her and waiting in silence without looking at me. I’d pounce and put my arms around her and everything would happen quickly and without a word. I’d be desperate to get it over with and when we were finished, she’d slip out of my grasp and gather up her clothes, leaving me feeling empty inside as the details of the encounter sank in, stripped of the clamor of pleasure, so that I felt the same disgust that I had felt during my college days when my hand touched the sticky, slime-covered belly of a frog, and I would try to rid myself of it with a hot shower.

  At the beginning of our relationship, I used to make sure that my mother was asleep before calling Huda to my room. After a while, I no longer bothered. My mother knew what was going on and didn’t care or, at the least, didn’t dare to object because she needed Huda constantly. Huda it was who fed her, washed her body, changed her clothes, went with her to the toilet, and had learned by heart the times for all her different medications.

  After a session with Huda, I’d go out and find my mother sitting in bed, all eyes. She’d always open a conversation or ask a question designed to reject the notion that she had any idea of what had just happened in my room. When sometimes I complained to my mother that Huda was neglecting my things and hint that I was thinking of getting rid of her, she’d look at me with terrified eyes and say, “Never mind! I’ll send her today to clean your room.”

  I was certain that what she meant was that she’d send her to me to have sex with. My mother couldn’t imagine her life without Huda, and the thought that anyone might make her mad enough to leave the house terrified her. She would have liked her to leave everything else and sit by her all day and all night. She trembled with fright at the idea that one day she might need Huda and not find her, and when Huda was obliged to neglect her to take care of her baby girl, Kawsar—when she went to feed or change her—I could feel my mother’s terrible resentment at the situation. Once Kawsar got sick and had a high temperature so I gave Huda ten pounds to take her to the doctor but my mother objected and made out that it wasn’t important, insisting that children often got fevers that went away on their own without treatment and without doing any harm. Huda was almost convinced that there was no point in going to the doctor and wouldn’t have done so if I hadn’t insisted. When in the end Huda left with her daughter and my mother and I were alone together, she scolded me for insisting. I answered her that children needed care and that the fever could be a symptom of a serious illness. My mother was silent for a moment and put her finger in her mouth (a habit she’d acquired along with her illness); then she looked at me with a terrified and evil expression on her face and whispered, “Just think, Isam! If our Lord were to rid Huda of that girl of hers, she’d really be free to look after me.”

  I muttered something in disavowal, not believing my ears, but my mother turned her face as far away from me as she could, made a gesture with her hand, and said as though making light of it, “What’s so bad about that? Lots of babies die. It’d just be one more gone to join the rest.”

  8

  Huda, who was deposited as a baby in front of an orphanage, taken as a child by a lady from Alexandria to work in her house, inured to having her arms and chest branded with a heated spoon for the least mistake or carele
ssness; Huda, the traces of whose early sufferings made her look in the incandescence of pleasure like a stray dog devouring, with a mixture of impatience and disbelief, some food it has come across unexpectedly—it was this Huda’s fate to rule over us all, myself, my mother, and my grandmother, grasping our will in her fingers and squeezing. Sometimes (after I had had her and satisfied my needs) I would get mad at her and shout reproaches at her, as masters are supposed to do with their maids, at which point she would kill my anger with a single look and I would have to try calmly to make her understand her mistake. Her look would tell me, “Have you forgotten?” Sometimes she would make me rue my anger for a whole week, or two: I’d call her to my room and she’d come in and close the door and stand there; but when I started in on her, she’d push me resolutely away and leave with a killingly quiet step that set my desire on fire. Once her refusal of me lasted more than a month and I ended up begging her to allow me. Begging her! She looked at me for a while to register her victory over me for the last time and then let me use her body. At night, my mother would call Huda to take her to the bathroom; this might happen two or three times in one night. Sometimes Huda would pretend that she was asleep and couldn’t hear and my mother would go on calling, holding in her urine and suffering and calling, and when in the end my mother started weeping as she begged, Huda would arise from her repose with the leisureliness of a goddess and take my mother to the bathroom. Despite her years, my mother didn’t dare to blame her; on the contrary, she would receive her with a flood of blessings. That left my grandmother, and her Huda would scold in front of everyone, my mother usually joining in. My grandmother had reached eighty and so no one loved her any more, for kind feelings also have an allotted life and wither and fade, and one’s survival beyond one’s expected span somehow provokes people. No doubt my mother and my Uncle Abbas, thirty or forty years ago, used to love grandmother a lot, and to think, despite themselves, of the day on which she would die and how they would then mourn her for ages. But that sad day was delayed until they could feel the approach of their own ends, while my grandmother squatted there, unbudged by death.