The Yacoubian Building: A Novel Read online

  That’s how Taha el Shazli recalls the events of the day of the character interview: the long corridor of luxurious red carpet, the huge spacious room with its lofty ceiling, the large desk raised enough above floor level to make it seem like the dais in a courtroom, the low leather seat on which he sat, the three generals with their huge flabby bodies, white suits, shiny brass buttons, signs of rank, and glittering decorations on their chests and shoulders, and the presiding general, who welcomed him with a precisely measured, disciplined smile and then nodded to the committee member on his right. The latter propped his arms on the desk, stuck his bald head forward, and started asking him questions, the other two watching him closely as though weighing every word he spoke and observing every expression that appeared on his face. The questions were what he’d expected, his officer friends having assured him that the character interview questions were always the same and well known, the whole test being no more than a formality carried out for appearance’s sake, either to exclude radical elements (based on the National Security Service reports) or to confirm the acceptance of those blessed with influential friends. Taha had memorized the expected questions and their model answers and proceeded steadily and confidently to give his answers before the committee. He said that he had obtained high enough marks to qualify for one of the good colleges but preferred the Police Academy so that he could serve his country from his position as a police officer. He stressed that the job of the police was not simply to maintain order, as many thought, but social and humanitarian (giving examples of what he meant). Next he spoke about preventive security, in terms of definition and methods, approval appearing clearly on the examiners’ faces and the presiding general even nodding his head twice in confirmation of Taha’s answer. The former then spoke for the first time and asked Taha what he would do if he went to arrest a criminal and found him to be one of his childhood friends. Taha was expecting the question and had prepared the reply, but he made a show of thinking a bit to increase the impact of his answer on the examiners. Then he said, “Sir, duty knows nothing of friends or relatives. A policeman is like a soldier in battle—he must carry out his duty irrespective of all other considerations, for the sake of God and his country.”

  The presiding general smiled and nodded with frank admiration and the silence that comes before the end reigned. Taha expected that the order to dismiss would be given, but the presiding general suddenly looked hard at the papers as though he had just discovered something. He raised the sheet of paper a little to make sure of what he had read, then asked Taha, avoiding his eyes, “Your father—what’s his profession, Taha?”

  “Civil servant, sir.”

  (This is what he had written on the application form, after paying the Community Liaison Officer a bribe of a hundred pounds to sign off on it.) The general searched through the papers again and said, “Civil servant or property guard?”

  Taha said nothing for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “My father is a property guard, sir.”

  The presiding general smiled and looked embarrassed. Then he bent over the papers, carefully wrote something on them, raised his head with the same smile, and said, “Thanks, son. Dismissed.”

  His mother sighed and quoted the Qur’anic verse, “It may happen that you will hate a thing which is better for you.”

  Busayna cried out vehemently, “What’s so special about being a police officer? Police officers are as common as dirt. How happy I would have been to see your officer’s uniform, when you were earning pennies!”

  Taha had spent the day roaming the streets till he was exhausted and then come home to the roof and sat with his head bowed on the bench, the suit that he had put on that morning stripped of its glamour, baggy now and looking cheap and wretched. His mother tried to cheer him up.

  “Son, you’re making things too complicated. There are lots of other good colleges apart from the police.”

  Taha remained bowed and silent. It seemed it was beyond his mother’s words to deal with the matter and she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him with Busayna, who moved over to sit next to him on the bench. She drew close to him and whispered, “Please don’t upset yourself, Taha.”

  Her voice set him off and he cried out bitterly, “I’m upset because of all my wasted effort. If they’d set a particular profession for the father from the start, I would have known. They should have said ‘No children of doorkeepers.’ And what they did is against the law, too. I asked a lawyer and he told me that if I brought a case against them, I’d win.”

  “We don’t want a court case or anything of that sort. Know what I think? With the grades you’ve got, you should enter the best college in the university, graduate with top marks, go off to an Arab country and earn some money, then come back here and live like a king.”

  Taha looked at her for a while, then hung his head again. She went on, “Look, Taha. I know I’m a year younger than you, but I’ve worked and work has taught me a few things. This country doesn’t belong to us, Taha. It belongs to the people who have money. If you’d had twenty thousand pounds and used them to bribe someone, do you think any one would have asked about your father’s job? Make money, Taha, and you’ll get everything, but if you stay poor they’ll walk all over you.”

  “I can’t let them get away with it. I must make a complaint.”

  Busayna laughed bitterly. “Complain about who and to who? Do as I say and no more useless ideas. Work hard, get your degree, and don’t come back here till you’re rich. And if you never come back, better still.”

  “So you think I should go to one of the Arab countries?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  The question took her by surprise and she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, “God willing.” But he said sadly, “You’ve changed toward me, Busayna. I know it.”

  Busayna could see another quarrel coming, so she said with a sigh, “You’re tired out now. Go get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  She left but he didn’t sleep. He stayed awake for a long while thinking, recalling a hundred times the face of the presiding general as he asked him slowly, as though reveling in his humiliation, “Your father’s a property guard, son?” “Property guard?”—an unfamiliar expression, one that he’d given no thought to and that he’d never expected. An expression that was his whole life. He had lived it for long years, suffered its oppression, resisted it with all his might, and tried to rid himself of it. He had struggled so that he might escape through the opening provided by the Police Academy into a respectable, decent life, but that expression—“property guard”—was waiting for him at the end of the exhausting race, to ruin everything at the final moment. Why hadn’t they told him at the beginning? Why had the general left it to the end and shown how pleased he was with his answers to the questions, then directed his final thrust at him, as much as to say to him, “Get out of my sight, you son of a doorkeeper! You want to get into the police, you son of a doorkeeper? The son of the doorkeeper wants to be an officer? That’s a good one, I swear!”

  Taha started to pace the room for he had made up his mind that he had to do something. He told himself that he could not remain silent while they humiliated him in this way. Slowly, he started to imagine fantastic scenes of revenge: he saw himself, for example, delivering the generals on the committee a speech about equal opportunity, rights, and the justice that God and his Prophet—God bless him and grant him peace—had bidden us to. He went on rebuking them until they melted in shame for what they had done and apologized to him and announced his acceptance into the academy. In the final scene, he saw himself grasping the presiding general’s collar and shouting in his face, “What business is it of yours what my father’s job is, you cheating bribe-taker!” Then he directed at it a number of violent blows, in response to which the general fell to the ground, drowning in his own blood. It was his habit to imagine scenes like these whenever he found himself in difficult situations that he could not control.
This time, however, the scenes of revenge, for all their power, could not assuage his thirst. Feelings of humiliation continued to bear down on him, until an idea occurred to him that he could not get out of his head. Sitting down at the small desk and taking out a piece of paper and a pen, he wrote in large letters at the top of the page, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Complaint presented to His Excellency the President of the Republic.” He stopped for a moment and tipped his head back, feeling some comfort at the grandiloquence of the words and their solemnity. Then he applied himself diligently to writing.

  I have left this space empty because I couldn’t think what to write in it.

  Words are all right to describe ordinary sorrows or joys, but the pen is incapable of describing great moments of happiness, such as those lived by Zaki el Dessouki with his sweetheart Rabab and, despite the unfortunate incident, Zaki Bey will always remember the lovely Rabab with her magical, golden-brown face, her wide, black eyes, and her full, crimson lips when she had undone her hair so that it hung down her back and sat in front of him drinking whisky and caressing him with her provocative voice, and how she excused herself to go to the bathroom and came back wearing a short nightdress, opened to reveal her charms; and he will remember that playful smile of hers as she asked him, “Where shall we sleep?” and the irresistible pleasure that her soft, warm body bestowed on him. Zaki Bey remembers every detail of that superb lovemaking and then suddenly the picture in his head becomes distorted and is violently disturbed, and finally cuts out altogether, leaving behind it a dark emptiness and a painful feeling of headache and nausea. The last thing he remembers is a low sound like the hissing of a snake, followed by a penetrating smell that stung the membranes of his nose, at which moment Rabab started examining him with a strange look as though watching for something. After that, Zaki Bey remembers nothing….

  He awoke with difficulty, the hammers of an appalling headache banging on his head, and found Abaskharon standing next to him, showing signs of apprehension and whispering insistently, “Your Excellency is unwell. Shall I call a doctor?”

  Zaki shook his heavy head with difficulty, making an extraordinary effort at the same time to gather his scattered thoughts. He thought he must have been asleep for a long while and wanted to know the time, so he looked at his gold wristwatch, but it wasn’t there. Nor was his wallet on the table next to him where he’d left it. At this, he knew for sure he’d been robbed and little by little started to make an inventory of what was missing: in addition to the gold watch and the five hundred pounds that were in his wallet, Zaki Bey lost a set of gold Cross pens (unused, in their case) and a pair of Persol sunglasses. The worst blow, however, was the theft of the diamond signet ring belonging to his elder sister Dawlat el Dessouki.

  “I’ve been robbed, Abaskharon! Rabab robbed me!”

  Zaki Bey kept repeating this as he sat almost naked on the edge of the couch that shortly before had been a cradle of love. At that moment, in his underwear and with his frail body and empty, collapsed mouth (he had removed his false teeth so as to be able to kiss the Beloved), he looked very much like some wretched comic actor, resting between scenes. Overwhelmed by misery he put his head in his hands while Abaskharon, agitated by this momentous event and excited as a locked-up dog, started to strike the ground with his crutch and pace the room in every direction. Then he bent over his master and gasped out, “Excellency, should we report the bitch to the police?”

  Zaki thought a little, then shook his head and remained silent. Abaskharon came closer and whispered, “Excellency, did she give you something to drink or spray something in Your Excellency’s face?”

  Zaki el Dessouki had needed that question in order to be able to articulate his anger and he flared up, raining insults on the unfortunate Abaskharon. In the end, however, he accepted his help in getting up and dressing, for he had decided to leave.

  It was past midnight and the stores on Suleiman Basha had closed their doors. Zaki Bey walked with dragging steps, staggering from the effects of the headache and fatigue, an enormous fury slowly building up inside him. He thought of the efforts and the money that he had spent on Rabab and the valuable things she had stolen from him. How could all this have happened to him? Zaki Bey the distinguished, the woman charmer and lover of noblewomen, tricked and robbed by a low prostitute! Perhaps she was with her lover at this minute, giving him the Persol glasses and the gold Cross pens (unused) and laughing with him at the gullible old man who had “fallen for it.”

  His ire was increased by the fact that he could not inform the police for fear of the scandal, echoes of which would inevitably reach his sister Dawlat. Likewise he could not go after Rabab or make a complaint against her at the Cairo Bar where she worked since he knew for sure that the owner of the bar and everyone who worked there were hardened criminals with previous convictions and that the robbery might even have been carried out for them. In any case there was no possibility they would support him against Rabab, and it was even on the cards that they would beat him up, as he had actually seen them do with disorderly customers.

  There was nothing for it therefore but to forget the whole incident, and how difficult and painful that was—not to mention the anxiety weighing on his heart over the theft of his sister’s ring. He started blaming himself: when he had got the ring back from Papasian the jeweler’s after it was mended, why had he kept it in the office instead of hurrying to return it to Dawlat? What was he to do now? He could not afford to buy a new ring and even if he could, Dawlat knew her jewelry as she did her own children. He feared his confrontation with Dawlat more than anything else—so much so that when he arrived in front of their apartment in Baehler Passage, he stood hesitating at the entrance and it occurred to him to go and spend the night at one of his friends’ houses, and this he almost did. But it was late and his exhaustion was driving him to go upstairs, so he went.

  “And just where has His Lordship been?”

  These were Dawlat’s opening words to him as he stepped into the apartment. She was waiting for him in the reception room, on the seat facing the front door. She had wrapped her chestnut-dyed hair on her “boucles” and covered her lined face with thick layers of powder, while a lighted cigarette in a small gold holder dangled from the corner of her mouth. She had on a blue house robe that covered her thin body and had stuffed her feet into her “pantoufles,” which were shaped like white rabbits. She sat knitting, her hands moving in a quick, mechanical way, never stopping or slackening their pace, as though they were divorced from the rest of her body. Habit had taught her the skill of smoking, knitting, and talking simultaneously.

  “Good evening.”

  Zaki said the words quickly and tried to move on directly to his room, but Dawlat launched her attack immediately, screaming in his face, “What do you think you are? Living in an hotel? Three hours I’ve been waiting for you, to and fro between the door and the window. I was just going to call the police. I thought something must have happened to you. It’s too bad of you! I’m sick. Do you want to kill me? Have mercy on me, Lord! Lord, take me and let me rest!”

  This was a kind of brief overture to a quarrel in four movements that might stretch out till the morning and Zaki, quickly crossing the hall, said, “I’m sorry, Dawlat. I’m extremely tired. I’m going to sleep and in the morning I’ll tell you what happened, God willing.”

  Dawlat, however, was alert to his attempt at flight and, throwing the knitting needles from her hands, rushed at him screaming at the top of her voice, “Tired from what, you poor thing? From the women you spend all your time sniffing after like a dog? Wise up, mister! You could die any day. When you meet Our Lord, what are you going to tell Him then, mister?”

  With the last cry, Dawlat gave Zaki a hard shove in the back. He staggered a little but rallied his forces and slipped inside his room, where despite Dawlat’s fierce resistance he managed to lock his door, stuffing the key into his pocket. Dawlat continued to shout and rattle the doorknob
to make him open up, but Zaki felt that he’d made it to safety and told himself that it wouldn’t be long before she got tired and went away. Then he lay down fully clothed on the bed. He was tired and sad and he started to review the events of the day, muttering in French, “Quelle journée horrible!” Then he thought of Dawlat and asked himself how his beloved sister could have been transformed into this vicious, hateful old woman.

  She is only three years older than he, and he still remembers her as a beautiful delicate girl wearing the yellow and navy school uniform of the Mère de Dieu and learning selections of La Fontaine’s animal verses by heart. In the evenings she would play the piano in the reception room of their old house in Zamalek (which the Basha had sold following the Revolution). She played so well that Mme. Chedid the music teacher approached the Basha about the possibility of her applying for the international amateurs’ competition in Paris, but the Basha refused and Dawlat soon married Airforce Captain Hassan Shawkat and had a boy and a girl (Hani and Dina). Then the Revolution came and Shawkat was pensioned off because of his close relations with the royal family and soon after died a sudden death while still less than forty-five years of age.

  Dawlat remarried twice after him but had no more children—two failed marriages that left her bitter, nervy, and a cigarette smoker. Then her daughter grew up, married, and emigrated to Canada. When her son graduated from the School of Medicine, Dawlat waged a fierce battle to stop him emigrating. She wept and screamed and implored all her relatives to convince him to remain with her, but the young doctor, like most of his generation, was sick to despair of the situation in Egypt. He was determined to emigrate and offered to take his mother with him but she refused and was left on her own.

  She rented out her flat in Garden City furnished and moved in to live with Zaki downtown, and from the first day the two old people had not stopped feuding and battling as though they were sworn enemies. Zaki had got used to his independence and freedom and it had become difficult for him to accept anyone else sharing his life—to accept that he would have to stick to appointed times for sleeping and eating and that he would have to tell Dawlat ahead of time if he intended to stay out late. Her presence prevented him from inviting girlfriends home, and her barefaced interference in his most private affairs and her constant attempts to dominate him made her even harder to put up with.