MOHAB NASR

Disgrace

Half reclined on the sunny shore of her life

She built a pile of sand

And set in it a ring

And said: Let’s play Where’s love hiding?

Thus did I become a husband.

She knew

A wave could reach out like an angry tongue,

That feet en route

To another umbrella

And families with kids in swim suits and small flippers

Might gouge through the same spot,

Salt water appearing

At the furrow’s bottom.

But with this circle round my finger,

With these dreamt-up limits to hope,

She built her idea of life:

A partially arranged coincidence,

A symbol

Of disgrace

That we could discuss

As though we really meant it.

********

Apple garden

Clean-shaven

He’d present his cheek to her each morning

For her to lay her kiss

Like an apple on a dish:

A gleaming apple

He wipes in the sun

On his daily route

Incredulous it’s still there;

An apple that prompted him to smile shyly

At his colleagues

Who pinched his other cheek.

He was proud, too, of this garden

Which thrives, day after day.

Each morning

Ascending with razor and coming down singing,

A peasant on his way to the fields,

While she…

She was under the warm covers

Listening to this gathering of hay

And thinking

To bear him a dog

To guard him from the thieves of joy.

********

A point of view

He strikes his thigh

And rises

As if summing up his position on the world;

Hands clasped behind his back

He thrusts his head forward,

Counter to the course of his life,

Like a prow, hastening to meet the next wave.

********

The outstretched hand

An arm is severed

But the past remains there,

Like a void in my sleeve

On the verge of greeting someone.

I’m forever missing my way

To the outstretched hand;

My tongue turns

Searching the mouth for a word.

With my bad hand

I write you my letters

That the smut not smear

Your fingers,

While a restive flame leads

My canted steps.

********

A blow off the table

When he came to strike

His blow fell off the table,

His poise was shaken

And his whole life fell into despair.

“We warned him…” (they said)

“We saw his long neck beneath his friends’ windows

Bolted in the night;

We touched the black blooms on his pillow

And his thoughts scattered over the bedroom’s boards

Like damp butts.”

In his kitchen

The broad knife slept

Across the lone tomato

Left over from the night before;

His capsized shoe by the entrance

And its sole, bearing the filth of his life.

Eyes closed,

As though his eyes were somewhere else:

“Who are we?”

“Who am I and who are you?”

Smoke here,

Smoke there,

As they listen to the whisper of its blind wings.

Striking the walls of the houses

The leaden air of cafes at dawn;

Striking even his face, which is him no more.

He had transformed completely

Into an emotion, encircled in the square,

Into a vast nose,

Like a dream distended,

Out of control.

********

My angel

Like schoolboy and schoolgirl

We walked the pavement

Along the wall,

We stretched our legs out in the sun

Barefoot, like a morning off.

In short clothes,

Four arms

And four legs

And us not knowing, my angel, what to make from all this

Nor how the others do it.

We have talk,

Talk,

Always heading in the direction that embarrasses us,

And we’re unable to hold out our hands

To tell it, “Not this way,”

And in truth, nor do we wish to,

Because we—what can I say?—

We know how impossible that is

And this is what intoxicates us,

This is what stretches out our tongues to lick

The last piece of chocolate.

Let them wait on us, my angel,

In the cinema,

In the garden of innocent friendship,

In the house built on sighs:

We are utterly lost,

You and I.

Like schoolboy and schoolgirl

We place a wetted finger

On the pages of the novels;

We read

Our lives and weep because

The heart turns counter to the clock.

Who’s with us?

A game of love in the guise of a locomotive.

We sneeze,

On edge beneath the smoke,

We feel a pain in the brakes;

Two faces out the window

Roaring at each station

And the hankies, bidding both farewell,

Rising and falling.

My angel,

Suitcase of duties shaking in my hand:

Each time I crossed a street

Thinking, “Who am I?”

It was as though I were you

Without my knowing why.

Your life

Under my pillow

And my false dreams;

I reach out in my sleep:

Help me…

********

********

ALAA KHALED

Royal Poinciana

In our old house in Alexandria

I took my leave of the old Royal Poinciana

With the red flowers,

And in Los Angeles

Was caught off-guard by three more

With purple blooms, younger,

And still white in recollection,

Which hung out over each morning through the windowpane,

Swaying with the motion of the wind,

Appearing and vanishing like a child’s face.

At last a visitor had come to them with ties to that line

That branched out anciently across the land

From a single equatorial seed;

I came to remind them of their lost inheritance from that moneyed clan

That disbursed its shade without thought to cost

And spread the ground beneath the feet of low-born men with coloured carpets,

As they trod their daily paths,

Till they thought themselves on course to take a prize.

Sadness treks from spot to spot,

And wears a new colour every time.

********

From afar

From afar

I see my house in that German village,

I see myself climbing the stairs and descending dozens of times

To rock my worry;

Cups of coffee, their odour nailed onto the walls

Like a living Christ without resurrection or sacrifice,

The wheat fields, which have crept into the house

And sprouted between the squares of damp tile

And dozens of black starlings

Drawn up in lines behind the glass.

My house was a season of harvesting

The rare grains

That I brought with me from Alexandria

And scattered, day after day,

In idle hours, at work,

In all the corners that my eye roamed round

Like a peasant’s rough palm sowing seed,

A pilgrim circling a sacred precinct.

I see the long empty hours

With me sitting on the sofa watching the rain,

The hours, not all of which I filled with memories,

Holes in the weave of days and months,

Channels for the guttering rains

Soaked up by the ground

And vanishing beneath a muddy layer of woe;

Somewhere inside me

Was a Nile, sprawling out

And peasants, who sat with me at eventide.

Tunnel

Naeem opens the door himself. He’s the man of the house and no one opens the flat’s front door but him.

The man enters with great aplomb. Naeem’s son Waleed follows after. Waleed looks at the ground, shamming shyness and sadness, but after a few seconds this act is dropped completely: Waleed gazes groundward, thinking of nothing; his feigned sadness replaced by a genuine bewilderment. But the whole process shouldn’t take more than a few minutes and after that he must think what it is he will have to do.

The man sprawls expansively on the living room sofa, as though he is its sole occupant. Naeem sits next to him, gesturing in welcome. Naeem’s happy that he’s come, repeating phrases of welcome—wasn’t this Naeem’s idea in the first place?—while the man fidgets, wanting to get it over with.

The guest asks in whose name the certificate is to be issued. Naeem raises his hand in the guest’s face, indicates that the whole business is about him. The guest takes a single sheet of paper from his pocket. He begins to write. Seconds later he is done. He re-reads it, checks what he’s written, then asks Naeem his name. Waleed answers, giving his father’s full four-part name: Naeem Abdel Naeem Ahmad Abu Sabaa. He holds his father’s identity card and hands it to the guest. The guest checks the name then leaves it on the table. The guest transcribes Naeem’s name onto the sheet in a clear hand then signs. He raises the paper in Naeem’s direction and asks for his approval.

Everything’s ready now, the doctor says. He can complete the process with total confidence and peace of mind.

Calmly, Naeem reads the sheet of paper. He knows exactly what’s on it. No matter how unfamiliar the phrases written there, they all mean the same thing in the end. His son sits beside him and his daughters follow proceedings through a chink in the bedroom door. His wife’s within, seated on the bed. She’s instructed the six girls to give her the signal when the guest takes Naeem’s money. She stays in bed, planning for what will happen in a few moments time. She has no opinion about what’s taking place. Atyat has given up caring about anything and there’s no longer anything to prevent Naeem doing as he pleases. At last, she will be delivered from her cares at last and so shall Naeem; at last, the boy will shut up; the girls, all of them, will be on the best of footings. She is waiting for a signal from the girls, still waiting.

At first Naeem resists, but now the tears pour down his cheeks. The guest attempts to comfort him, but Naeem gives an unintelligible croak, which the guest interprets as a final croak of grief. He tries to divert Naeem from his woe, tells him that his task is now reduced to this: to getting the burial permits issued. Loads of people do this every day. As soon as someone hits sixty (sixty years on earth, not at his job) they do exactly as Naeem is doing: with pious, confident hearts, they ask him to issue certificates. Few weep in such circumstances. They do it of their own free will, with no pressure; they give thanks for their deliverance.

Naeem can’t keep quiet. He starts sobbing like a child. The man pats his shoulder, tells him that nothing’s changed: the one difference is that he is about to enter the realm of reward and punishment, those two most exacting of angels. Initially, Naeem doesn’t get his flippant tone; after a moment’s thought it strikes him that this flippancy is tantamount to blasphemy. For a beat he stares at the sardonic doctor and falls silent, because in that moment he hates him. Impatiently the doctor asks about the cash. The doctor’s hardened tone, a sign of boredom, makes Naeem hate him more. Naeem holds out his hand with the sum they’ve agreed on. He takes it then gets straight to his feet, heading for the door. Simultaneously, at a tiny signal from the girls, Atyat starts screaming and the girls start weeping.

In an instant, without a moment’s hesitation, as though they’d been waiting for the scream, the woman’s neighbours show up, wearing black and shedding heartfelt tears. Then they come into the bedroom. They heard the screams and knew Naeem was dead, God have mercy on his soul. They come in through the flat’s front door, greet Naeem then enter her room. God have mercy on his soul. God have mercy on his soul. At first Naeem responds to the women with a tilt of his head, but after the third or fourth he gets fed up and stops. Since the doctor declared him officially dead he’s been thinking before his every move: Should I do this, or should I do that? He hasn’t moved from his seat since the doctor left. Now, he is attempting to order his actions in his head. He is trying to imagine what will happen today.

After the woman come the men. Waleed stays in the living room with his father (God have mercy on his soul) welcoming the visitors. They shake his hand and squeeze his palm and he squeezes back to show his toughness, his staunchness, to signal his manliness, his new authority: he is the man of the house now.

Every minute brings someone else into the flat until the living room is completely full. When they see there’s no more space in the living room people start moving into the kitchen, standing around to await their release. Then they stack up on the stairs of the building. They start smoking. They make a terrible racket. They’re all waiting. Someone lifts a pot-lid in the kitchen, inquisitive and hungry, and despite the voices, murmurs and screams, Atyat hears the sound and quickly gets up, opens the bedroom door. Everyone looks at her. Then she turns to Naeem and addresses him, asking him to get moving.

Through force of habit he heads through the crowd for the kitchen and fills a glass with water. The water tastes unpleasant and he spits out what he’s drunk. These pre-departure rituals are meaningless: they were meaningless when Naeem was alive and they are certainly meaningless now. To Naeem, it seems as though he really is dead, that death has changed the taste of the water in his throat. Naeem moves towards the door, asking everyone to descend to the street. He spreads his arms as wide as they can go then, looking down, he starts to stir the air as though herding chickens. His actions provoke resentment in some of those present. He was a miser, God have mercy on his soul. But in the end they move off in silence. Naeem waits for a few minutes then comes down after them, down to the street.

He is walking unhurriedly now, ahead of the rest in his role as the dead. Atyat appears on the balcony, screaming heartbroken and longingly. She calls out to Naeem, hails him. She says nothing readily intelligible, just the usual clichéd phrases; meaningless in such circumstances. Her agitation grows and her screams swell louder with every sentence. She is on the verge of collapse. Atyat reaches a state of unusual incoherence and begins repeating her final sentence over and over again, hysterically, words none of those standing down below can understand at first, nor once they’ve been repeated.

Naeem walks calmly on, the cortege behind him. The bystanders don’t understand what’s going on but they join without thinking, walking a few paces then asking their neighbours what the procession’s for. They’re astonished. What about the deceased, they ask, the coffin? The procession starts to speed up. They scamper, as though they’ve had enough or they’re late for some mass appointment. Naeem falls back, keeping to his steady pace, and ends up in the main body of walkers.

A neighbour approaches and demands that he speed up and Naeem looks at him coldly, a mute eloquence that says: It’s my funeral and it’s up to me how fast it goes. The neighbour understands the look at once and starts explaining to Naeem that a flying casket is a mark of the deceased’s piety and that this sluggish pace carries other meanings. Naeem doesn’t understand what he means and starts pondering the word “casket”. There’s no casket in this procession, flying or crawling. Naeem ignores his neighbour and goes on, walking along as calmly as he set out. This he regards as the right thing to do; what he’s thought the right thing his whole life long. He will never scamper. A person walking in a funeral procession should be calm and dignified, he believes. The funeral is the final salute to the deceased. Naeem has never been able to see the connection between a coffin’s flying along and it’s occupant’s piety.

Suddenly, two men raise him aloft, then two more take him, then two by two they start passing him forward, all trying to convey Naeem to the head of the procession. As they bear Naeem along, the procession grows faster. Everyone joins in. Naeem suffers bruises and cuts from calloused palms and long nails. Someone fingers his arse, someone else fingers his arse, then the fingers rain down. This is what Naeem had been afraid of. They put it up him after he married Atyat, they put it up him many times while he lived (and not just with fingers) and today, when he’s dead, they’re putting it up him again. Having endured the pain, the poking fingers, the dizziness from being tossed about in mid air, he loses patience and kicks out at the crowd with his feet. He forces them to bring him back to earth. He pauses while he recovers his breath, watches the procession as it draws away. He watches the people heading off towards the mosque, a long way ahead of him.

They reach the mosque. They rush to remove their shoes and they go inside. Naeem arrives after the rest, furious at what has just happened to him. He’s made up his mind to prevent them putting on a repeat performance in the procession from the mosque to the graveyard. When the prayers are over he’ll take a taxi and leave them to walk to the graves.

Naeem enters the mosque carrying his shoes. He cheers himself up. These are the last prayers he’ll attend in this world, he thinks. The noon prayer has finished a few minutes ago. The Imam takes the microphone and in two short sentences reminds them of the funeral prayer. Naeem tries squeezing into the front row. He pushes people until he reaches the Imam. This is his prayer and he should be standing in the front row. The Imam notices him. He raises his forefinger, casting a stern look at Naeem, then points unwaveringly to the exit. Naeem is ejected from the mosque.

Naeem doesn’t understand what’s going on. The people around the Imam don’t understand his agitated gestures. They look helplessly at the Imam. No one wants to break the sacred silence. The Imam loses patience with their stupidity, approaches the closest person to him and whispers in his ear. Comprehension and concurrence appear on the man’s face. The man walks up to Naeem, takes his arm and calmly escorts him outside the mosque. At last Naeem understands: the Imam will not permit a man to say a prayer over himself. He comes outside, then puts on his shoes and stands waiting for the prayers to finish. Utterly frustrated, he finally understands that people have begun to treat him as a dead man, even before the burial.

Naeem senses people moving behind him. He turns to find them slipping on their shoes. They’ll notice him any minute now. He sprints to the street to get away from them then raises his hand to stop a taxi. He jumps in quickly. Naeem looks smugly out at them standing there, dumbstruck at his behaviour. He pokes his middle finger from the taxi’s window: returning the compliment.

With perfect elegance and a comprehensive knowledge of interpersonal etiquette, the taxi driver refuses to accept the fare from Naeem. He swears terrible oaths in God’s name: he shall not take it and that is that. For his part, Naeem also feels that he is under no obligation to pay the fare. If people have begun treating him as a dead man, then he’ll start treating them like a dead man would. But something in the driver’s determined refusal provokes him. This counter-intuitive insistence insults him, angers him: anger piled on anger, shit on shit. Naeem chucks the banknote into the cab and passes into the graveyard. He walks rapidly until he reaches the family plot. Twitchy and upset he stands waiting for the others. He puts his hand into his trouser pocket.

The gravekeeper approaches Naeem, trying to work out why he’s here. Today isn’t a day for visits. Visits to the tombs usually take place on public holidays. People remember their dead in times of joy. Furthermore it is the burial hour, so the gravekeeper assumes that Naeem is the first of the burial party, that the coffin will be along shortly. The gravekeeper asks Naeem about the deceased’s family, about the deceased’s name; asks him to produce the burial permit. Naeem looks at him, searching for stupidity in the man’s eyes, and almost says, What’s got to do with you? The gravekeeper keeps on talking, explaining that opening the grave will take a while and that he needs to know which grave they want so he can start the process and prepare it for the deceased. The burial permit is the key, he says. Without it, the gravekeeper will never open the grave. The permit’s more important than the deceased.

Naeem let’s his irritation show: here he is, a dead man, with a doctor’s certificate, a clutch of mourners and the family, yet one man won’t recognize him and waits for a piece of paper from the health registry in order to bury him. A piece of paper, signed by a civil servant or two, stamped with the famed eagle. The paper chases after him, in life and in death. Naeem is confident: Waleed is about to arrive from the heath registry with the stamped permit.

Someone approaches Naeem, standing there alone amidst the graves. The man wears a tattered old gown. His beard is patchy, unkempt, ugly. Mechanically, the man sits down and rests against the nearest grave. He holds his right palm against his temple and begins to recite. His voice is ringing, guttural: the faint croak favoured by fans of the art: By the soul and He who set it in order, and inspired it awareness of wrong and right; He who purifies it, succeeds and he who corrupts it, fails… Naeem quivers at the man’s pronunciation. Is that Hindi? Doesn’t he know Arabic? A donkey with a dictionary, is it? This thing graduated from Al-Azhar? This thing graduated? Your peasant voice is fit for warbling about fruit and veg but it won’t do for the Quran. Naeem is on the point of screaming in the man’s face to correct his mistakes, but shame prevents him. Shame and the apathy that has a hold on everyone these days. But the greatest deterrent to Naeem is the fuzzy light encircling the man like a halo. The light stops Naeem setting him straight. Naeem regrets the criticism and scorn he’d directed at the man in his mind. At this blessed moment, a few minutes before his own burial, as the fellow recites the Quran over his suspended soul and muffs the pronunciation, Naeem realizes that doing things right is the exception to the rule.

The gravedigger’s finished digging: a vertical shaft two metres deep or more, then a short tunnel beneath the plot into the burial chamber. The gravedigger returns to the surface. He stands next to Naeem.

The mourners wait around. None of them know what they’re supposed to do now. Half an hour goes by and they all stand there, motionless, silent, everyone waiting for everyone. They waiting for someone to speak and show them what to do. Everyone waits for one man to move, for one man to come and solve the problem.

At last, someone motions to the gravekeeper and gravedigger to fill the hole in. They both look at him stony-faced. The gravekeeper shakes his head, exhibiting incomprehension. He says, Where’s the deceased? Open the coffin, and turns his head to scan the bystanders, looking for the coffin, the coffin that hasn’t made an appearance yet today. Someone calmly informs him that there’s no need for the burial, that he must fill in the hole and that’s an end of it. It looks to everyone like the gravekeeper is going to ruin everything.

Waleed explains the situation to the gravekeeper. He points to his father and tells him that the deceased is standing in front of him. There he is, alive; there’s no need to bury him. Once the grave’s been closed up, it’ll all be over. There’s no need for all this noise, no need for objections and endless talking. On his side, and as a man who respects his profession, the gravekeeper insists on the burial. He looks at the undertaker and asks him if the corpse was washed and wrapped in the graveclothes. The undertaker shakes his head, dumbfounded by what’s taking place around him. The gravekeeper insists on completing the procedure in the correct manner. He asks for soap, a scrubber, a bottle of cologne and linen. With finality, he says: We’ll wash him and wrap him then we’ll bury him.

In illegal dealings such as these people rely on the element of surprise. If that approach fails then pressure must be gradually applied until the thing is brought off. The shock felt by the gravekeeper when he heard Waleed’s words has led to his absolute rejection of what’s happening. Hope hangs on pressure from those around him, the pressure which will slowly bring him round. Lots of people start talking in an effort to persuade him. They speak logically and reasonably. The lawyer explains the relevant articles of the law and points with his forefinger: here’s a loophole. Then he points in the other direction: and here’s another loophole. See how many holes there are, brother? Each one dips his bucket; each one does what he does best. A single rule governs this illegal operation: so long as it stays secret it’s still on. But this time, the gravekeeper’s insistence on completing the burial comes as a surprise to everybody.

The undertaker brings the graveclothes, the soap and a kettle full of water, then a metal basin for washing corpses is produced. It’s all laid out in front of Naeem, while everyone stands there, watching to see what will happen. Naeem looks around as if to say, Are you crazy? Instantly, everyone starts trying to coax him round. The washing will only take a few minutes and then it’ll be done; like you never took your clothes off. They’ve given up hope of prevailing on the stronger party and start trying to impose their will on the weak. Things must go on. In Egypt, things cannot stop, they must go on: even if we do someone an injustice, even if we squander cash and bodies like fools.

At last Naeem gives in and the memory surfaces beside him: on his right hand side (as always) a square metre of the earth’s surface rises up. This time, Naeem feels the memory as an independent entity, enjoying what it’s seeing. An entity that’s pleased at what will befall Naeem in the minutes ahead.

Naeem takes off his clothes. He lies in the metal basin. Three of those around him remove their shoes so they don’t get dirty and begin to pour the water over him, while he just shields his crotch with his hands. After his body has been covered with soapsuds and his skin scrubbed, Naeem gets out of the basin bare naked. He wraps himself in the graveclothes, leaving only his nose, mouth and eyes showing. Now, he looks like a ghost, or a woman wearing a white gown.

Naeem looks about him, pleading for help. He can’t utter a word. He can’t say a thing, whether he wants to or not. He gestures with his hand as if drinking. Immediately, one of the bystanders hands him a jug to drink from, but the water is bitter. It’s full of sand and dust. Naeem spits out what he’s drunk.

The gravekeeper carries him and takes him to the shaft, but Naeem will not have anyone put him in it. He signals that he’ll enter the shaft himself. He will crawl along the tunnel unassisted. At last, and without any help from gravekeeper, Naeem descends into the shaft. His body, legs and shoulders grate against its sides. Its rough walls threaten to lacerate his body, but he insists on seeing it through to the end. With some effort he reaches the bottom of the main shaft. He doubles up and crawls along the horizontal tunnel, slowly making his way towards the tattered dead. These are his people: father, grandfather, grandmother. At last, Naeem settles amidst the bones. On edge, afraid, his eyes contend with the surrounding darkness, searching for a light that shines, that comes from above. But everything is silent, and still.

********

Dear Salah,

So many years, now. I’ve been sending you these letters for how long: twenty? Have we done twenty years? Or is it twenty-five? I don’t remember!

We’ve travelled together from the age of coded letters to coded phone calls then to the fax (so secure and convenient) then on to the Internet and its tricks. We’ve come great distances, Salah.

All this time I’ve never asked you for a single thing: no personal favour, no intercession, no promotion, not even a raise. Nor have I requested any information. And I’ve held to our agreement: I’ve sent you nothing but my personal opinion, based on what I’ve seen, my experience and my reading of people around me. I made no objection when you chose to ignore certain of my suggestions. Naturally, I never expected to adopt them all, nor did I expect that all of what I had to say would suit you.

But forgive me: this time I shall be asking one silly little favour.

I want the name of the donkey who wrote the president’s last speech.

However powerful he is, however many important offices he might hold, he’s a donkey and these offices of his, of which I’m sure he’s proud, can only be his by mistake. I can’t believe your system lets idiots like him occupy sensitive posts, and shame on your system for letting him write the president’s speeches.

Who told him that people want to hear Mubarak talking about melons? I couldn’t believe my ears. The melon, my dear man, is associated in people’s minds with the balding, ground-down government clerk who comes home from work carrying a newspaper and a melon; returning home in the heat of summer, sweat covering him, carrying a melon on one arm and a newspaper wedged in his armpit. He calls out to the missus to put the melon in the cooler while he takes a little rest from the street’s heat then, before it gets cold through, he takes it out of his Ideal refrigerator and cuts it up randomly (stealing as he slices a small piece which he swallows down in a rush) in order to devour half of it after he’s eaten his lunch. And in the evening he tells his friends sitting in the coffee shop about the melon he ate after his meal. It might be rosy-pink, a “baldie” like his head, or full of water, or tasteless, just like him. And then the fellow will fall silent, because in the eyes of his wife he’s a man who doesn’t know how to pick a sweet melon and therefore he’s a simpleton, a man who doesn’t know the inner workings of things. So he shuts right up in front of his friends, because if he spoke about his bald melon he’d become an object of mockery. The melon is a symbol of all that’s mysterious and random and ridiculous.

My dear Salah, we agreed some time ago it was very important that Mubarak not appear in his summer suit and, God be praised, we haven’t seen him in it since. I worry that he might start wearing it again now he’s got all these donkeys around him, writing speeches about melons and other foolishness.

The biggest disaster, Salah, (I almost wept during the speech) was that the president was speaking after opening a new carpet factory. Do we really need to be opening more state-owned Egyptian factories, Salah? And worst of all: it’s a carpet factory! Why is Mubarak talking about the July revolution, about the workers, about Egyptian machinery? Why all this socialist stuff? People have forgotten those days. Abdel Nasser erected factories in order to provide people with jobs, nothing more. He didn’t build them to produce a product or set up an industry. They were spending millions just so he could mention the word “workers” in his speech, just so he could put a tick next to employment, so he could declare to everybody that the Egyptian would find work when he finished his education. A socialist state, Salah, or that’s how they wanted it to look: socialist.

Then the world moved on and the chance at industrialization slipped from our hands into the hands of the Asians. History has shown that we don’t understand the meaning of the word industry. We’re a nation of brokers, of middlemen, midway between buying and selling and industrialization and anything else you can think of, but we’ll never be an industrial nation. Egyptians lack the skills. More important than that, my dear chap, is that most Egyptians have turned their backs on that whole period, on the working class, socialist Sixties. Are you going to remind them of it now? Are you going to reopen the wound of socialism, of the Setback and the wars? Abdel Nasser was a genius because he was able to exploit the revolutions and independence struggles taking place all around him, and he applied it all to Egypt. But things are utterly different these days.

Didn’t we say that Mubarak’s era would be one of stability? That any link between it and past periods of dynamism and disquiet was counter-propaganda? Salah, I want the name of the donkey who wrote the speech.

And what’s all this stuff about factories, anyway? Brother, enough with the factories. Give Mubarak a break; he’s as old as your father. The man’s feet are worn to stumps from all the factories he opens each year. Build as many factories as you like, but don’t plaster the man’s face on them. Egyptian factories are destined to fail. The Egyptian worker’s a faggot by nature, the Egyptian architect’s a thief, the Egyptian manager fools around with the secretary: the factory is bound to fail. The workers will demand higher wages and will work less; the architects will devise labyrinthine frauds and, of course, will keep quiet when the workers rise up (their unspoken motto always: We do us we’re told, preserve us if you please); and the managers will see the workers’ revolution as a sign that they need to replace the secretary.

I repeat: we are a nation of middlemen.

I’m asking you now: What will happen when the workers go on strike and the factory fails, when the fraud and the fevered kisses come to light? Will people make the connection between the factory and the president? Of course they will. They’ll remember the president clutching a pair of flannel pyjamas and chuckling. They’ll remember him quizzing so-and-so and whatshisname about the jobs they do in the factory. They’ll remember him asking the lady with the swollen belly about her pregnancy. They’ll remember the pictures of him opening a factory a day in Egypt.

Fine, brother. Let him talk about melons. Let him open a factory. Let him talk about workers. But opening a factory and talking about melons and workers in a speech at the opening: that’s really pushing it, Salah. If President Mubarak loses half his support, you’ll be to blame.

The plan has to change. The focus must shift. President Mubarak is no longer the simple citizen who rose from ranks to lead the nation. We used to put that image out, but things are different now. The referendum on the president’s fifth term is fast approaching and who knows, maybe there’ll be developments: multi-candidate elections to choose the president. For the first time in their long history, Egyptians could choose a president to rule them. The time has come to change the president’s image.

President Mubarak is the only man capable of steering the ship of state: the only skilled skipper we have. He does what he does because he’s the only one with the experience to do it, the experience that makes him hang on to his position as leader. You understand me, of course. This new image must be put out there: the image of the expert. Everyone should be asking: Who’s the right man for president, instead of Mubarak? And the answer should always be: No one. No other human being is capable of taking Mubarak’s place. 

The three short pieces on Al Danasouri are by Hamdi Abu Golayyel and Yasser Abdel Latif.

The beer celebrations

(From The Scowler’s Scales)

For Alaa Khaled

For you: the whisper of fire in my lungs

And the loathsome stench of a small forest burning,

And for me:

A brazen lust that forever draws me towards your blood.

My friend, who spent his life hidden behind his size,

Who dubbed himself “The romantic bull”

In calculated concealment,

At last came clean with us:

He had a secret sister unknown to his parents

And he was a jinn, wanton and wild beyond compare,

And he wept to remember how God would drag him by the nape, by force, each Friday,

To the barber,

Then he began devising scathing jokes to put Him down.

And we realized:

All this time he’d been a prophet,

But tried hard to hide a warped relationship

Which bound him to the Lord.

My big-hearted friend:

Soon enough we’ll hold beer celebrations

And you’ll have me listen to much talk on women’s thighs

And full breasts.

He would visit me in my perpetual residence at the hospital

And when he showed

My trapped piss would flow and my kidneys would ease.

I never saw him in his military uniform.

She came with him one time and went

And he told me that she wept a lot that day.

At last, I saw that it was him I loved,

That it was for him I’d shell the egg each morning:

But it was too wide for his mouth and too tough for his brittle teeth

And because he hid from me his hunger

His innards stayed empty all the while,

Empty but for me.

******** 

Four takes on a single scene

(From Like a Blind Wolf)

Why feel lonely,

With a bed so wide

And within view

A low-slung plaster sky

In which you roam with your wandering eyes

To discover what you sought: deficient portraits

Of compliant strangers

And silent wars that never end?

Why feel lonely

When you can spend the night in the bathroom

Applauding the gush of piss from your bowels

Then bend down, inspecting the thick froth,

To think of the first beer you drank

And the first blind hand that clamped upon your tool

To knead it,

A long plastic rod

Indifferent to the screams of your childhood?

Why feel lonely

When likewise by night

You can break the straps carefully bound

About your swollen files,

That the air in the room’s suffused

With pungent odours

Of times past?

Why feel lonely, then,

When here you are, struggling intently across the airy lounge,

Between the balcony and the witchy eye,

In the room’s dead centre;

When, after swaying a little,

You can drop down on your back,

Legs and arms flung wide,

And with stony eye,

Direct an unflinching gaze at the lamp hanging from the ceiling,

And straining your hearing a little

Can also enjoy

Marking the faint ticking of your watch?

********

Proverbial wisdom

(From Like a Blind Wolf)

Women, my friend,

Are purest rumour, which mystics get caught up in believing,

Indeed, some take it so far as to claim that they’ve

Seen her

Spoken to her

Sat with her

And…

And…

We did it. I’m a rational man,

An unbeliever

But in what my senses tell me,

And this keeps me safe, enough

That my eyes be not deceived by chimeras;

My best guess:

That they’re the remnants of shop-worn legends,

Of religions that belong to extinct civilizations…

…

…

Women?!

Enough, my friend,

I beg you.

********

Frankly

(From One Eye Wandering, One Eye Amazed)

I’ll speak frankly

And I’m guessing you’ll be surprised,

But I have great faith in your good sense

And so: maybe you won’t be taken back at all.

I’m the older friend, storehouse of your secrets,

Telling you—not in jest this time—

That you are a beautiful woman;

Desirable and beautiful.

I can no longer bear—excuse me,

Better judgement can go to hell—

Your beauty puncturing me with sharp fangs:

Not tickling me; making me bleed.

Your flower has fully bloomed

And begun to send its scent abroad in all directions.

I’ve no desire to pick it,

No: leave it on your sappy, playful bough

To sway… and my dreams rocking right and left.

I only wish—so much!—to wrap like ivy round your branch

And finally press my snout to your pulsing stigma.

Do not be afeared:

One draught

Will be enough to send the soul surging once more

Through my dry veins.

********

At the fields’ edge

(From One Eye Wandering, One Eye Amazed)

I shan’t lie:

I never gave them more weight than a grain of wheat before!

And if you want the truth,

I never realised I was so passionate about them

Before tonight:

The dogs…

Most beautiful of creatures!

Bark, my brothers!

How much I’d love to stand on the balcony

And lift my voice to you,

But my bark sounds only within me.

Never you mind:

Here we are at dead of night,

Here are the streets, returned to your possession:

Make merry!

Beneath your paws now, a city entire,

And you might see, every so often, a human shadow

Passing you by, hastening, holding his breath,

The stench of his fear, which makes you gag, goading you

And you pursue him till he stumbles in his robe and tumbles

And you laugh

Then make your way back, happy and contented.

Come now, conduct your wedding feasts

And if you will, your wars,

Only, for my sake,

Do not stop barking.

Fine, fine…

It’s you, you lop-tailed terror;

How can I ignore your voice?

As though now, in you, I insult one of them,

Or rather, it’s as though you mock him

And the others laugh.

How happy you are, ye dogs.

You laugh so much,

You laugh

And fight

And fuck

Feud over titles

And mutter confidences back and forth.

How happy you are… truly.

But hang on:

I’m a country boy like you

And like you I don’t understand just why it is I’m here,

Yet my luck’s not so very bad:

See, the city’s spat me out to the field’s edge

In a neighbourhood abounding in wasteland:

Those kingdoms

That give in, vanquished, one after another.

So: what are you—

No, what are we—doing tomorrow,

Comrades?

********

Osama Al Danasouri: The sick wolf of poetry

Yasser Abdel Latif

January still lies ahead, with the New Year’s celebrations for 2013, with all the sinister implications of that “13”. January still lies ahead, and with it, the sixth anniversary of the passing of Osama Al Danasouri, the sick wolf of poetry, and yet there is a distinct feeling that he is hovering about above us, uttering his woeful howl from somewhere up in the planet’s outer atmospheres. It’s no coincidence that various different people have summoned up his memory in recent weeks. On Facebook, Hassan Abdel Mawjoud mentioned him, putting up a photo and some of his verses. A few days later, Hani Darwish wrote How great, now, is our need for Osama Al Danasouri, while on the same social website, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, his closest friend in the last two years of his life published chapters of the book he never finished about his final days.

I remember our last meeting.

Not the last exactly, because I bade him farewell on his sickbed one evening in the early days of 2007, a few days before he died, and the last thing I heard him say was, “A really rotten phase,” to describe the illness that killed him, as if by calling it a “phase” he might lessen my terror a little, reassure me that he’d pull through and get back on his feet. But I was talking of another meeting, about two months earlier…

I was taking a break from work in the Horriya Café in Bab Al Louq at noon one Friday and Osama came in stepping lightly, carrying as always a new packet of paper tissues and his pack of Lights. He was busy writing chapters of his beautiful and painful book My Decrepit Dog, My Darling Dog, but that day he read me his last poem, dedicated to his wife Sohair. It was an overdue love poem, in which he expressed to Sohair his profound gratitude for the unstinting love with which she bore his long illness and changeable moods. The poem was published in Al Ahram and Osama gave me the original manuscript, which I still have on my desk in Maadi.

The first time I met Osama was in ’90 or ’91, though I’d encountered the poetry before the man. We were still students at Cairo University, writing poetry and frequenting the Meadow Flower Café, which acted as a kind of union for urchin poets. From the older generation we saw Ibrahim Dawoud and Ibrahim Abdel Fattah playing endless games of backgammon and Fathi Abdallah forever and eternally smoking shisha while the scholar Hisham Qishta peered out at the world with a worried gaze from behind huge spectacles.

We got to know Bashir Al Sebaai and Ahmed Hasaan and they became close friends.

It was with Bashir that we first saw an elegant old man wearing a full suit with hair swept back like a foreign gent from a former time. He was Anwar Kamel, the sole surviving member of the Art and Freedom group, the Egyptian branch of the global surrealist movement. Anwar Kamel edited a magazine at the café called The Palm Shoots, two photocopied pages of prose and poetry selections from Arabic authors and in translation.

One day we got hold of a copy, which contained verses by a new generation of poets from Alexandria and we read the names Mohab Nasr, Nasser Farghali, Alaa Khaled and Osama Al Danasouri. There was no Internet then, no fringe magazines to carry the creative output of our generation and those a little older than ourselves. Even Akhbar Al Adab was still to come. Anwar Kamel’s Palm Shoots was the only way to find out about poets who lived just 270 kilometres away; it was Palm Shoots that brought us that unfamiliar spirit from out of Alexandria.

About a week later Alaa Khaled and Osama Al Danasouri came down from Alexandria and showed up at the Meadow Flower, and myself, Ahmad Yemaani and Mohamed Al Metawalli got to know them. Alaa was tall, a prolific writer who wrote his poems in tiny handwriting on white paper, which he carried in huge quantities in his bag. Osama was short, dapper and wrote sparingly. Each new poem was an event in itself. We also learnt that he had lived with a bladder disease since boyhood, a disease which would subsequently develop into kidney failure. Both had been born in 1960, which made them nine years my senior and a decade older than Ahmad and Mohamed.

Our friendship with the two poets was strengthened by intermittent visits between Alexandria and Cairo until Osama relocated to Cairo for good in 1994, settling in Faisal with Ahmad Yemaani, Iman Mersal, Haitham Al Wardani and Mohamed Badawi as his neighbours, all of whom lived through the nineties in a single residential block. Today, only one of them remains in that gloomy neighbourhood.

Osama was born in the village of Mahallat Malik in Kafr Al Sheikh and lived in Desouq and Ismailiya and in Alexandria, where he had a beautiful apartment that looked out over Sidi Gaber station from the ninth floor, and then in Cairo. He only once left Egypt, for Saudi Arabia, where he worked for a while as a science teacher in the late nineties.

During his twelve years in Faisal, Osama produced two poetry collections, Like a Blind Wolf (1996) and One Eye Wandering, One Eye Amazed (2003). He had released his first collection The Scowler’s Scales in Alexandria and it seemed that in Cairo that he had washed his hands of the book and its poems, though this didn’t stop him publishing In the Semblance of Someone Resembling Me in 2001, a collection that contained old poems in aamiya (poems that perhaps predated Scales and went back to his youth) with the addition of a single, later poem in aamiya, an elegy to the poet Magdi Al Gaberi.

We were aware of a hidden epic playing out in Osama’s personality, which he brought to light in My Decrepit Dog when he talked about his incarnation as a celebratory aamiya poet. In one chapter he recounts how, in his first year of university in Ismailiya, he would recite his aamiya poetry at student festivals, even singing it on one occasion. It seems that relocating to Alexandria immediately after this produced a complete change in Osama’s personality. Not only did start writing in fusha, he became known as a “heavy” poet, one who took his poetry seriously.

In the same book Osama wrote:

My whole life, I have always considered myself (as have others), and still do, to be a poet… I lived in the Land of Poetry and regarded myself as a citizen of the first rank. Now because the Land of Poetry is a land that exists beyond the real, it does not appear precisely the same in the eyes of all its inhabitants. One sees it as a fertile oasis, a bountiful land: green trees all year round. For another it is barren and desolate: he walks for leagues and miles, past mirage after mirage, until, in the end, a single tree appears, a lone fruit hanging from it; for a little while he seeks its shade then goes on walking, his mouth wetted with the sweet juice, his stomach at rest… Each pities the other… The first, so excessive is his pity for the second that he cannot see him at all; as for the second, he can see the first full well and knows just how wretched he is. He knows, too, that all the fruits he hoards are nothing but chinaberries: good for nothing. This is how Osama saw himself—of the second sort, of course—and this is how he explained his lack of productivity and his long breaks from writing.

The poet Abbas Beidoun said of him: “This is exactly the kind of poet that remains a poet whether he writes or not, who procrastinates so much that you forget he once wrote something once or twice…”

In his last weeks, Osama discovered an ability to write reams of prose and he began setting down the chapters of My Decrepit Dog, one after the other. He wrote, as Mohamed Badawi said, “like someone eating through the last of his supplies: nervy, engrossed and hurried. Every time he produced a new chapter he would carry it about with him wherever he went. He sent it to distant friends and read it to those close by, just as he would read his poetry…”

The book concludes with a scene of hope renewed amidst the remorselessness of the disease: a kidney transplant. Had Osama finished the book? Or almost finished? As long as Osama’s life had continued, it’s my belief that the book’s pages would have kept step with him.

********

Green Polo

Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Whenever I see a green Polo I say to myself, “Osama!” I don’t mean, of course, that I dash after it like a idiot; rather, that I stop still, lose my way, and sometimes break out laughing at the thought of our excursions in the green Polo. Osama would drive me as far as Al Talebiya and drop me off to finish my trip, crossing both lanes of Pyramid Road, hopping over the steel divider in the middle (one time, I fell; I’m telling you: flat on my face), and taking a cab into the underbrush of Talebiya.

For years we’d act with each other as though this were a generous and considerable favour, one for which I’d continue to thank Osama, waving gratefully until he vanished into Faisal Street. Then a friend of sound judgement, a neighbour from my building, gave me to understand my error: “Brother, even the microbus is easier. Call that a lift?” Yet for years I went on waiting for the chance for a lift in the green Polo; for years I kept on killing myself, twisting round in thanks and gratitude and appreciation until he vanished into Faisal Street.

The green Polo is just one model from the life of the ever-renewing and unique poet Osama Al Danasouri. Before that he had a Seat prone to shuddering seize-ups that were usually worst on up-ramps. Osama thought highly of it—the green Polo, I mean—and he always felt he wasn’t taking proper care of it. We usually rode it at night and oh, how lovely it was at 11pm, how lovely, with us perfectly happy, the mood just right, with the green Polo and Umm Kulthoum on the radio and, if Umm Kulthoum’s song didn’t quite fit the bill, then Osama would play one of his purchases which he held in such esteem: Ahmed Al Bereen for instance, or Abdel Al Mutallab or a rare tape of Faiza Ahmed that he remained proud of his whole life long.

Sometimes Osama would talk and usually tell tales of odd coincidences and situations that would make us burst out laughing, and always he would drive confidently, smoothly and with perfect manners, but if he sensed any slight or liberty he was capable of squashing you flat. One time that’s literally what he did. He was driving along the street when he got caught up in one of those disasters so common back then. Suddenly, with Osama proceeding along happy as you like, there appeared in front of him a young man mincing across the middle of the road. He honked at him—not a blind bit of notice—and Osama got angry, he lost control, and stamped on the accelerator smack into his back. And the odd thing was, brother, that the mincing youth was upended on the ground and took off running.

The only time we didn’t speak or listen to songs in the green Polo was the night he started his last book, My Decrepit Dog, My Darling Dog, the book he rose up from death to write and no sooner finished writing than he died.

We left Dar Merit at the ideal time, 11pm exactly, and in an extraordinary state of joy and gaiety and contentment. I was swaying along to Umm Kulthoum—Since the day my sweetheart went away, I’ve been tending to my wounds—when suddenly Osama stretched out his hand and switched off the radio. I glanced at him and saw that he looked grave—or lost, say—and I shut up. I sensed that my silence relaxed him. He seemed preoccupied, captured, by something. True, he handled the Polo confidently and smoothly but he looked as though he were gazing into some deep chasm, not with fear, but with awe and joy. And suddenly: “I want to speak. I feel the words whirling in my chest.” He felt his chest and I don’t know why, but I had this image of his words like ribbed things, ribbed zones: dips and rises and bottomless caverns.

“What do you say we go to a café in Faisal?”

We found a cosy corner and sat on a couple of chairs away from the people on the edge of the road. And Osama began to talk, his theme the grand old, foolish old days, the days I lived so profoundly and with such extraordinary pleasure. I was the happiest man on the face of the earth. Nowadays, I know that I’m the most insignificant, but such knowledge benefits me nothing. How I wish those days might return.

********

Osama, the city spits out its scum

Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Osama grew up in a religious environment, one with a deep-rooted adherence to religious principles and law, a family that through generation after generation had gone to Al Azhar. And he was observant. From the first, he was observant. He prayed at the proscribed time, fasted during Ramadan and the other periods of abstention (on Mondays and Fridays, too, sometimes) and he remained observant until he travelled to Saudi Arabia.

Out there, on the blessed tracts of the Hejaz, he began to change, or rather, grew indolent. He went over to the dark side is what it was. Of course, he didn’t go all the way over. He stayed a true believer all his life and in his last days broke down, fell from his pedestal, as he sought to prove to his mother that he really did pray. But he started to neglect the rites and the observant family noticed His father the sheikh grew most upset. He feared woe, damnation and a bitter end for “his eldest” and to leaven his doubts with certainty, asked him the very question his mother was later to pose: “So, Osama… So, my boy… Are you a believer in Our Lord and in Islam?” And, of course, Osama got the self-same fright and answered with the very words he spoke years afterwards to his mother: “What are you saying, Dad? Good grief! Of course I’m a believer! And I believe a lot, as well!” But he never became observant. Day after day his conviction grew that the true meaning of faith and religion was one thing and what the pious did, something else entirely. By the end of his life he was couldn’t stand them. Sometimes he’d burst out at me: “Brother, I loathed narrow mindedness, I loathed fanaticism and racism and ignorance and intolerance.”

Osama went to Saudi Arabia for work. He stayed in Medina, close by his father who had gone before him, and he got a job as a teacher, not just of geology, which he had studied, but of everything. He used to give private Arabic language lessons to a most peculiar boy who hated studying and teachers and Osama in particular. He’d try to get rid of him any way he could and would frighten him with “the iguana”, concealing it behind his back then suddenly brandishing it in Osama’s face. Osama would fall backwards then take off running, the kid on his tail.

Anyway, Osama worked in Saudi Arabia for five years and would visit Egypt in the summer holidays. During the holiday in his last year there, 1991 I think, his first poetry collection, The Scowler’s Scales, came out. He published it at his own expense, a limited number of copies, and naturally he took a few back with him to Saudi Arabia. He gave the collection to the headmaster and a few of the teachers, including a Syrian teacher who wrote poetry himself, and spoke to a friend of his in Riyadh, the poet Saad Al Hameedein, telling him that he was keeping a copy of the collection for him. Saad invited him to pay a visit to meet some Saudi writers and spend a couple of days with them.

The Hajj was looming and Osama decided to spend the Hajj holiday with Al Hameedein in Riyadh, but his father, the sheikh, wouldn’t let it lie. As we know, Egyptian workers in Saudi Arabia perform the pilgrimage every year—two birds with one stone, as it were—and Osama himself had gone on Hajj more than once, and the sheikh made an issue of his decision, linking it to what he viewed as Osama’s change.

“You pray, then do you, Osama?” he asked him. “You honestly pray? Here you are, in the Prophet’s backyard, not praying and now you’re going to miss the Hajj?”

But Osama stood firm. He claimed his holiday, took off to Riyadh and had a great time. Al Hameedein held a part in his honour attended by writers and intellectuals.

He had his holiday, came back and went to school. He was writing the date and the name of the next lesson on the blackboard when the headmaster suddenly opened the classroom door: not so much open it as slam it shut.

“What have you done, Osama? What have done, my boy?”

He glanced around in terror and dragged Osama to his office. He shut the door and made certain it was shut.

“The intelligence services are after you!”

The Syrian teacher had informed on him.

Now the security services understood what “scales” meant. It meant “scales”. “Scowler” left them baffled. Some said it was a reference to the king, others went much further, but in both cases the only outcome was woe, ruination and great wailing, and before his eyes Osama saw stretched out the deserts of the Empty Quarter, the wild beasts and the folk tales he had heard. Fortunately the headmaster was from a prominent family and fond of him, and he told him that the only solution was to leave Saudi Arabia on the spot: to be in Egypt within forty-eight hours. As so it came to pass. Things panned out and Osama was able to get away.

Of course the sheikh, the kindly old dad, almost perished out of fear for his son and did all he could to save him from certain destruction. But he hadn’t forgotten the business with the Hajj, the blessing that Osama had abjured when he travelled to Riyadh, and at the very height of the crisis he uttered the phrase Osama was to repeat his whole life through:

“Osama, the city spits out its scum.”

194. “You know you’re a coward?” she said, for the first time staring into his eyes without confusion or uncertainty. She hadn’t completely finished tying the ponytail when she looked at him and he couldn’t believe it. “I’m the first to tell you?” Not a flicker; just the first signs of a smile upon her lips. “You really are a son of a dog’s religion of a coward.” And before he could give expression to his astonishment he found his arm in motion, as if of its own accord. “A coward,” she was saying, “because you’re not prepared to exchange your position for another, even in your imagination. You’re scared to put yourself in a woman’s place because you’re scared to ask yourself whether, in those circumstances, you would marry. This isn’t a fear like the human sentiment with which to varying degrees we’re all familiar: it carries a moral presumption and a glib satisfaction with your own circumstances. That’s why I’m telling you you’re a son of a dog’s religion of a coward…”

195. And this, as I see it, was precisely Moon’s genius. When she came out with abrupt and sudden declarations of this sort it was with a tremendous energy, an intentness that summoned thoughts of the weak standing up to the strong, the revolutionary to his oppressor, and she would make the man before her feel, in consequence, that her words came forth from a deep place: that she’d thought hard about it and that it pained her. Her subtlety in inferring views, which her inner cogency or indifference would not permit her to air more comprehensively, was what gleamed in her eyes as her lips quivered. Meanwhile the truth was that she said things by way of experiment and cared deeply only about their immediate impact; things that sprang from an absolute lack of cogency. Moon would lie, tentatively, without believing herself, and the things she said were clichés even though our admiration of the speaker might mask the fact. This was the genius Nayf fell for, despite his shrewdness, because it was—as I see it—a genius of cliché, while Paulo and I, with the less brains or the greater weakness, hooked the Joke and the Slogan.

196. She was saying, “That’s why I’m telling you,” when Nayf’s palm settled on her cheek. And when the palm slid down to her neck she went on: “You’re a son of a dog’s religion of a coward. Am I right or what? When you said that it makes no difference…”

197. It wasn’t a slap precisely, though the arm was raised, the palm stretched rigid and the shoulders a straight line through a circle’s centre. It was like the threat of a slap, which Moon would have returned immediately had she not lost her balance beneath the weight of the slapper, now standing over her head. As he turned to face her she tottered and swayed, until she came to rest cross-legged on the couch, her long summer dress hitched up off a brown and slender thigh. At which point she looked him in his eyes again. She herself did not know if something in her gaze was different but it no longer fazed him that she looked.

198. A thigh, brown and slender, but aglow and suffused, and her long thick hair, numberless streaked chestnut strands gathered in a ponytail, and her, looking at him. Did Nayf recall the lion? Did the recollection affect an energy pulsing in his body, that was like desire and was not desire? A rosy thigh and thick hair and breath of basil with a pulsing energy and her hair and a brown and slender thigh.

199. Moon did not flinch as the palm encircled her nape, the thumb settling on the Adam’s apple, and it did not seem that she was immediately aware of Nayf’s other hand tugging the ponytail down as he returned to his seat beside her, chest-out this time; only, with the thumb’s pressure and her head’s canting back, her voice became strangled till she stopped speaking, then a faint whine was heard followed by panting—her lips clamped tight—as though it did not come from her. And though she did not laugh when he hissed in her ear, “This son of a dog’s religion is your mother’s dad,” it came as no surprise to him that she didn’t resist. “Your mother’s dad… daughter of a whore.” He was bringing his face up to hers so that his forehead settled on her nose, as if to crush it. And she was pressing her lips together ever more violently, her breath was drawing closer while her knees parted little by little, further and further.

200. Recalling a gathering of the Crocodiles which took place weeks before that night I can almost hear Nayf, cackling derisively at a scene of a masked man flogging two pale buttocks, all that showed of a woman straitjacketed in steel and black leather, on the Internet. How, then, was his thumb now on the verge of sinking an Adam’s apple into the throat of a girl kneeling on phosphorescent plush? Later, Moon will tell him that the marks left by his hands and teeth, if she had seen or heard of them on any other girl just a day before that night, would have filled her with disgust.

201. “And yet,” she will go on, with that sour grin of hers which scattered the beauty from her face “it seems I like abuse and caveman stuff. With you, baby, I’ve found what I deserve.”

202. In 2001, and up till now perhaps, in our conception of civilization—Nargis and Saba’s conception, Moon’s conception, of civilization—the sweetness of sex was incompatible with physical violence. Especially when the violence came from a man and was directed towards a woman, we viewed it as nothing more than an unnuanced machismo exercising its unreconstructed masculinity; it never occurred to one of us that it might be probing psychological depths quite unrelated to any worldview blowing in from behind the buffalo. Power, possession and absolute loyalty—unlike “self-development”—were things we distanced ourselves from with all our might. A man beating a woman to arouse himself or her would mean he raped her, subjugated her body, something that repelled us to the utmost degree. Yet we needed violence more than anything. Perhaps this need for violence—our need to feel the power of possession and a desire for an absolute loyalty to justify our lives, for the temptation to recreate some person in the world other than ourselves—perhaps this was what set Nayf in motion and set loose in his body an energy that resembled desire, yet was not, or not just.

203. So it was, that when she did not part her lips as they made contact with his mouth, which had suddenly grown wet, he did not hesitate to lick them then bite them harder and harder until he was barely stopping himself from drawing blood. And after her hands came to rest beneath his shoulders on the pretext of pushing him away—she wasn’t pushing him but pulling him in, planting her fingers through the back of the T-shirt and into his ribs—Nayf was astonished at himself for the savagery with which he bit Moon, cheek and neck, after lowering the dress from her shoulders and, pulling off her bra, likewise on her breast.

204. Her breast, in size and shape: a lemon; but the nipple is black and very large, a charcoal knuckle, and when his teeth encircle it at the root as though to nip it off—I mean the nipple—it’s owner will open wide her lips for the first time and her basil scent will blend with something between pepper and smoke and she will not make a sound. As though the whine that came from her before signified a resistance now broken in the face of a more profound and authentic pain; precisely as though the pain was (and leaving aside what we’d repeat among ourselves, Paulo, Nayf and I, that a person who’d lost pleasure or despaired of it must cling to pain as the only way to feel alive… As I write, in this moment, about myself, I believe that what keeps me alive, confronted by reports of parliamentary elections ongoing since November, is the pain of those twitching on the asphalt after inhaling gas, of those struck by bullets in their eyes, of those stampeding from the scourge of billyclubs and electric cables… The pain, that biting light in whose absence no one perceives a thing); as though the pain was, for Moon, the key to a locked door behind which lay her truth, which she would never confess except in jest or without conviction—all her lies were in the mirror—and which, consequently, she could not express with any sound whatever.

205. I see him slapping her seriously this time then, while circling her until he stands behind her as she kneels, twisting her arms behind her with one hand and with the other pulling off her underwear then lowering his clothes to enter her as though ramming a plank of wood into a wall cavity—all this in a single movement, like lightning—and he finds her wet and easy—as I was not to find her, at first—and leans over her back all overlain with gleaming chestnut hair to breathe in the smoke and pepper and search for a trace of basil, which draws further and further away amidst a throbbing pressure, only to return damply with her panting.

206. Then, as Nayf leans over Moon’s back, he will sink his hands into the curve of her flesh and yank her bunched hair, scour it, then insert his whole thumb into her anus to lift her sex towards him and will reach out his hand to mash her nipple between two fingers then fall to smacking her rump again. And with the resolve of a saint tortured by Romans on the shore of the Red Sea, she will keep holding back from crying out—not a sound except her faint pants broken, despite herself, by eruptions of a lowing or braying she struggles to cut off—until the moment that her small brown body quakes, spasm after spasm, having pulled her arms from his grasp and settled on all fours, writhing in what resembles a fit, a freshly-slaughtered panther, biting the green plush as he looms upright then kneels upon the sofa’s edge, his feet still on the living room floor.

207. The oblivious body. Which solicits a violence it did not know it wanted. Which offers up a sacrifice to something other than what constitutes living in Egyptian society. Far from ideas of sin and transgression, but far, too, from holding to any principle, no matter how straightforward and true the principle might be. The body, which I, Gear Knob, knew as boisterous, tyrannical for all its triviality, and in which I got to know The Crocodiles’ full stink, in one go; maybe Nayf intuited from her silence beneath this pain the truth of its moans. And forgot the lion. As he withdrew from Moon and left her bundled on the couch, still erect himself, yet to come—as he hurried to his bedroom to fetch two scarves and a fat candle in the shape of an apple—perhaps he forgot that a flesh and blood lion had been tormenting him for weeks.

24. Today, I’m convinced we were a room no one managed to enter except three lovers. Of them, it’s Moon who figures in memory or imagination, though the last to reach us: the shade for whose sake we left a door ajar. As if the other two got in by mistake. Is it because we never knew from where she came or where she went after it all came to an end? Was it for the sake of the tomboy traits, which were to lead us to covet one woman above all others in our circle? Moon was the closest to us in age and the only poet. Perhaps for her hyper-insubstantiality and her retention—despite the slightness and small size—of a lion’s charisma, perhaps because she was the most changeable and extreme, the one whose behavior it was impossible to predict from one day to the next, we left a door ajar for Moon.

25. In the evening I think on Moon as reports reach me from afar. Very far, it seems. Each time I’m made aware of the army’s thuggery then the lies of the military leadership and their political-media cheerleaders, each time I become conscious of people’s readiness to credit lies, I’m ever happier with my remoteness. Here I shall be cut off and secure; allowed to remember. It’s truly pleasant to be spending my time tapping away with a clear head while Egypt burns, and I reflect that the problem—perhaps—is that it doesn’t burn enough; that over there are those that talk about the threat the demonstrations pose to productivity and the importance of getting the economy going even as young men are abducted and tortured; that people run for parliament on the grounds of their familiarity with Our Lord, while Al Azhar’s men are murdered with live rounds. Because of this, because these events, in spite of everything, are limited, and because their significance is squandered with people’s readiness to believe in lies, I feel the necessity of remembering and am content with my remoteness.

26. In the evening I think on Moon as reports reach me and I’m thankful for the file before me on the computer screen as bit by bit it fills with words. I congratulate myself for creating a folder I named The Crocodiles—for this to be its first file—because, since doing so, I’ve lost the urge to descend to the battlefield of Tahrir Square or Qasr El Ainy Street and I feel no guilt. At times—and this is all there is—I am overwhelmed by grief. A biting light flares in my head, blinding and paralyzing me for minutes each time, and I shake and awake to a severe pain in my stomach. An hour later—not a tear shed—comes a burning desire to weep. I know none of those who’ve been killed personally, and though I’ve often put myself in the place of their family and friends—I know some of their friends—I don’t believe I’m grieving on their account. The pain whose light bites into me is a symptom of something else, a thing I don’t know how to formulate. As though you went to sleep in your comfortable home and woke to find yourself naked in the middle of the road. As though we have nothing else but this.

27. I think on Moon and remember that in 12/2010 or 1/2011, following the outbreak of Tunisia’s protests—even as the Tunisian police were killing people in the streets—one of the loyalists of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali’s government appeared on Al Jazeera asking in a tone of disbelief, “Is the solution to burn the country? Is the solution to burn the country?” Now, a year on from the outbreak of protests in Egypt, I repeat his words with differing sentiments, his voice ringing in my ears as the reports reach me: Is the solution to burn the country?

28. And since I think on Moon… It seems to me, objectively, looking back, that she so engineered her life to obtain the maximum possible quantum of love from the maximum possible number of people, even if the love were—given that Moon was full of it and never made any real effort with anyone, inescapably—superficial and short-lived. We alone, and maybe two or three others, knew her well enough to love or hate her from the heart… But this is a tale for later.

29. In her craving for love bought cheap or at no cost at all, and in being—even her—married and quite ready to love someone other than her husband, Moon was much like the other two; only, it seems to me that she surpassed them in one essential respect. Perhaps she was too clever to take on trust the free and constantly fluctuating affection in our circle. I don’t mean that she stopped striving for it with wholehearted devotion for a single day, but I believe that she, unlike Saba and Nargis, realised it would never benefit her so long as she was not prepared to pay the price. Thus, and following the same logic, it seems she did not convert it directly into an evenly-balanced transaction.

30. Saba gathered people around her by tootling a trumpet the sound of which they admired, then used them on a daily basis, as part of her sense of achievement in life. Nargis reeled them in by depicting herself as a victim of poverty, ugliness and backwardness who had managed to triumph over all these things; she’d acquire them like artworks, piece by piece, then in her time of need brandish them like qualifications and titles in the faces of inquisitors… But Moon did something shrewder, immeasurably so. I don’t know how to describe what it is that Moon did, even after reviewing everything I know of her, but I believe it’s firmly linked to ambivalence. The space for ambivalence with Moon—her vanishing and surfacing, her protean appearance, the importance she attached to secretarial work, greater perhaps even than writing—the space for ambivalence with her was wider than anything else; it was what equipped her to find her ease in a closed room composed of us, myself, Nayf and Paulo, it’s walls constructed from the scrutiny of poetry.

31. Around the time the The Crocodiles were founded, Moon’s poems had begun to make a shy appearance in our circle. We conceded they were considerably better than the other works by women, but for all that, up until 2001 when she became part of our lives without our being conscious of the change, we paid her no mind beyond a passing nod of admiration.

32. “Blood” (one of Moon’s first poems): Today, too,/ the vivid red poppies/ open inside clothes,/ unseen by all but you,/ and louder than the swish of speeding cars outside/ Edith Piaf’s voice/ informing me that this pain’s/ your child I never bore.// Why does the music remind me that they’re not roses,/ that their purpose is to prettify the drug,/ that they seem innocent and are evil?// Every month,/ with a joy greater than can be comprehended by your dissection,/ the deception pleases me/ as I moan until you pity me a pain/ that leaves me weak and craving,/and while you lick my tears, within me vicious laughter detonates/ as I kill another/ of your children.

33. Now, it feels like Moon is fundamental and still present, so much so that I can’t believe she had not yet appeared by the end of Millenium Eve; that at dawn on 1/1/2000—while we were on our way back from the huge official party called “Twelve Dreams of the Sun” held on the Giza Plateau—life still barely held a thing called Moon.

1

Leila Anton remained a woman surrounded by mystery all the days of her life. Few were those who set eyes on her; fewer still those who claimed to know her well. The real issue was that even those who’d seen her remained wracked by doubt over what they’d seen. They remembered scenes in which she figured, but all was uncertain as dreams or shadows. More than one resolved to write about her but no sooner started than he’d be plagued by doubts over his own existence, as though a lack of certainty over her existence instantly cast a veil over his own. Setting the letters L-E-I-L side by side all is effortless and untroubled, but the instant the final A’s signed off the devil mounts the author. It begins with lethargy and questions running through his mind of the What-am-I-doing? Where’d-I-ever-get-the-balls-to-write-about-her? type, questions that evolve into unequivocal and bitter convictions: I’m not writing… I don’t exist… I was never born… My father never knew my mother… At best I’m just a spark in the mind of a non-existent god…

Leila takes off her knitted jacket in the dark. Static sparks. Watching the air, charged with new force, Leila’s eyes flash. Were some imaginary figure able to observe her eyes he should not know which brought the other into being: her eyes’ lightning or the knitted jacket’s sparks. A third element intrudes and the matter grows more complex. It is the gleam of memory shining in Leila Anton’s eyes: a memory from a distant past, which left her pledging fealty to the jacket’s sparks. Fealty doesn’t cover it. Add a feeling of feebleness and inconsequence in the presence of gleams like those that issue forth in darkest darkness from a filthy, shabby, knitted jacket; a feeling which, one black winter’s night before the sparks illuminating the room, led Leila Anton to sink to her knees and say in tones of unfeigned petition and terror: Mama… Mama…

Many speculated about the reason for Leila Anton’s failure to produce a boy or girl to inherit her great wealth, divvied up between five international banks. This, despite the men she married, not one of whom gave the slightest sign of suspecting infertility in his most potent wife. The speculation stayed buried in the minds of the questioners. No one voiced the question. They feared that were it spoken Leila Anton’s eyes would flash with unexampled rage. It was not Leila Anton’s rage that was frightening but rather her answer, simple and straightforward yet unendurably terrible, that would be thrown out in her eyes’ lightning, the electric lightning, the lightning so alike to static sparks cascading from a knitted jacket in a darkened room. They knew the answer. They feared it. They knew that Leila Anton had a daughter. Everyone knew she existed and held their tongues because this daughter belonged, somehow, to the realm of things which language does not speak of and in any attempt to speak of which lurks the potential for destruction. They knew that just to speak the daughter’s name means death; means absolute sundering, absolute inundation.

Just two were able to write about her. They kept on at it, stumbling even at the height of their excitement. Souad and Amina. One in Cairo, the other in Alexandria. At first they were afraid. Each one said, I shan’t write anything worth a dime. It wasn’t the trickiness of existential imponderables they feared, but triviality. They feared the writing flowing easy, as in some cheap romance. One sat at her desk in Khaled Bin Walid Street, the other in her dining room in Qullali, and they began. In the beginning neither knew of the other’s existence. They proceeded, pushing pen over paper and taking pleasure in the friction’s sound. Stranger still, perhaps, neither was aware of Leila Anton’s existence in the first place. Both began the story as a work of pure fiction, even as they pressed on so violently across the white paper, both certain that it was a purely imaginary person they hurt and wounded, whose virgin’s blood they caused to flow.

Leila Anton stands for long hours before the mirror. She experiments with certain expressions: angry, eager, fearful. She tries controlling the lightning in her eyes. She wants her lightning to rival sparks that spring from knitted wool rubbed against itself. Bit by bit a titanic struggle evolves between her eyes and the sparks in the blackness. She does not envy the sparks; just wants to come up with something similar. She wants her eyes to crackle in the dark like coals, jigging fire inside. She wants to turn her eyes to two real coals. Only in this way, says she, shall I see my daughter propagated from my eye: my daughter, of whose existence no one knows and if they do will never dare confess their knowledge. From my eye my daughter shall be born, just as I was born from the womb of a spark which fell from a knitted jacket in an old lady’s hand.

Souad and Amina said: Let me write something about a weary woman (not wearying but weary), who has suffered much in her life and is now a model of success. They opened the phone book to pick a name for this weary (not wearying) woman and their eyes fell on the name, Leila Anton. Just so, they said, and set to work. With time they became increasingly interested in sharpening the lead pencil to a point, capable of wounding and hurting the white page and thus the weary character that they’d chosen. Their delight at creating a new sentence was equivalent to the secret pleasure felt by two men who together (not in turn, but together) sleep with a woman as beguiling and abundantly detailed as Leila Anton, the woman who, in that moment, will be able to take pride in the fact she issued from the womb of a tome as important and bountiful as a phone directory, regardless of her place in the directory, ignoring the existential question of the number of the page on which the name Leila Anton falls.

Leila doesn’t remember much about her birth. All she recalls is a constant and immoderate longing for electricity, its bolts and sparks. In the beginning the longing would make her weep. Then the fact she could not break free of it came to frighten her, she who’d grown accustomed to smashing to bits her longing for anything till all she heard of it was a resounding clang. The longing, and her fear of it, began to grow inside her and branch out until she admitted, both to herself and to the knitted jacket’s sparks, the absolute filial bond that bound them. And like any daughter lately found out who she is she overdid her homage to this bond. She wanted to prove her affection for her discovered mother and she feared going too far. She wanted and at the same time she wanted not to want. Naked and barefoot on the water-wetted tiles after a hot shower she’d rub her feet against the plug socket and current would course through her skin, warm as a kindly mother’s embrace, sounding the same note as a daughter weeping before her mother, declaring: Hold me, Mama.

Leila Anton married five men and a man. The five didn’t last long. Whether the blame for this lay with them or with her, they had in common a feeling of loneliness in her company as if she were leaving a window ajar in mid-January. A coldness that stayed with them summer and winter. Fouzi said, My teeth would chatter in June. Adel put it down to the air conditioning. Murad stated that she never had air conditioning in the house and Raymon couldn’t remember if she had or not. The four of them—Fouzi, Adel, Murad and Raymon (plus Androus)—quickly discovered that they couldn’t remember a thing about her house aside from the desolate cold it gave off. All this and they knew nothing of their sixth, Labib Azer Bakhoum, who was found rigid in water on the morning of the third of August: rigid and dead, rent and spent.

Souad-Amina never conceived of Leila Anton being familiar with a pleasure like that of copulation, but they both did it with her regardless. They took off all their clothes and began to write, pressing the long, fat pen onto the paper, pressing harder and harder, the pen trembling, ablaze with its own private pleasure.

And they do not stop. The pen wobbles, trembling. They moan and make noises. They stretch it out as far as they can. They do not let the ink flow until their pleasure has reached its peak. At the last, with the thrill fully ripened in the pen, it spurts out ink and ideas. The white pages are spattered with paragraphs about a woman named Leila Anton. Souad-Amina stand on their balconies. They smoke and chew two eclairs. They smile with the contentment of a man who’s dumped his thick spermatic load.

Leila Anton stands before the mirror. She turns out the light. She lights up with rage. More accurately, she lights herself with rage. At first, the rage grows within her. A cell of rage, its flame spreading to another. The rage goes on popping and crackling inside her and slowly sweeps through everything.

When her eyes began to send out sparks she sensed the room almost combusting with light. As though the light flays her. Her pleasure begins to mount. At first, a tickling; sweet smiles. Then her guts begin to stir. Her sweat pours. There is no longer any meaning to her standing before the mirror, for the quantity of all-engulfing light emitted from her eyes allows her to see herself without a mirror. She retires aroused to her bed. She starts to strip. She lies on her back. By the time she comes to remove her knickers and her moans can brook no further delay, her rage and pleasure together (not in turn, but together) have flooded the room. By the time this thing within her (the sparks, the pen) detonates, the room has been utterly crushed beneath the weight of the rage leaping in her eyes. The electricity has set the whole neighbourhood ablaze. One hundred persons writing about a woman called Leila Anton are killed in mysterious circumstances. Two alone begin the first page of their novel about the same woman. The two smile in vain satisfaction, with all this ink now spilled across their pages.

Fouzi-Adel-Murad-Raymon-Androus said that this wasn’t quite true. They said they had never felt cold in her house: it was more a heat, a burning, though subsequently they were startled to find that they’d contracted influenza, developed a weak pulse, a consequence of unrelenting cold. They said, We couldn’t bear a speck of dust to touch our skin. We were hot and burning up. No, no: burning up and hot. That’s more like it. But not one recalled feeling any of the symptoms of influenza, despite their temperatures, which sometimes ran as high as forty according to the thermometers dangling from their mouths. They said, This made us doubly sensitive to pain. They said, The pain is unbearable. Our shining, delicate, reddened skin can’t bear it. Their skin was blazing red.

Labib Azer would sign his letters, written in French, with the two initials L.A. just as (or just as he imagined) Leila Anton did, but this was not enough for an equal and open relationship to develop between them. This was what he hoped for and he assumed that by these two Latin letters he could gain ascendancy over her; assumed that this French L.A. was a sign from a compassionate French god that would bind, linguistically, the fates of each with the other. Gradually, he came to realize that it was she who had bound him with the two letters. He found that the Arabic pronunciation of Azer had become too heavy for his tongue, that Air-Zeer was easier, even as he learnt that Leila Anton had never signed with her initials. The melodic noose he’d cast to bind his woman to him had come to loop about his own neck. And while Labib Air-Zeer yearned to return to the simple Labib Azer of old, this last was doing all he could to distance himself, preserving his pleasure in his own purity and gazing on the world with the eyes of an grand jester.

What Souad-Amina wrote about Leila qualified as a short story, but they were after a novel or an encyclopaedic work. They took to cramming it with needless detail. They weren’t really interested in Leila Anton’s life story, but their desire to clothe their woman in flesh and blood is what packed the work with all this crap, which was, nevertheless, impossible to do without. Why is it impossible to do without? they asked themselves and answered, Because a vast quantity of crap must surely contain one vital detail. This detail is the thing their protagonist elects to be her written truth, like a shower of static sparks filling a room, just one of which Leila Anton’s eggs select to become little DoubleLeila. DoubleLeila, who chose to be the daughter of the finest detail, of the impossible-to-deny physical embodiment of a woman picked from a phone book.

Labib Azer sat in the armchair. He opened a large book and puffed smoke from his pipe. He heard rapping at the door. Yawning, he got up to open it. He saw a figure like himself. Labib Azer said, Who are you? and the figure said, I’m Labib Air-Zeer, I’ve come to fashion you anew. Kill me then, said Labib Azer. Labib Air-Zeer said, Sure, took a revolver from his pocket and fired off several random shots not one of which hit Labib Azer, who said, You missed; give me the gun so I can try. He took the revolver and he too fired off random shots. Not one struck Labib Air-Zeer. Not even a scratch. At this, the two sat down and struck a glum, funereal note: We’re failures. We can’t even harm ourselves and both of us have ended up shamelessly alive. Shameless, shameless, shameless.

Not one of her husbands penetrated Leila Anton. She would lie on the bed and her husband would come to lie beside her. He draws closer and tries to touch her. She looks at him with irritation and says, You know prawns? Of course, he says. You’re a shrimp, she says and he cries happily to himself, I’m a shrimp, I’m a shrimp, and curls up like a shrimp and she looks at him in disgust and sets about peeling him. She peels off the first layer and starts fondling the skin that is uncovered, red and gleaming and inflamed. The shrimp screams, No, no that hurts me, and she knows that it hurts him because the shelled shrimp is hurt by that which will not hurt a shrimp unshelled. But the eyes of Leila Anton, smouldering with rage, burn with pleasure, and she commences pinching, rapidly and daintily, at spots all over her shrimps, whose bestial, plaintive squeaks rise higher. Here, Fouzi-Adel-Murad-Raymon-Andreas become five shelled shrimps like almonds upon Leila Anton’s table. Five shrimps, whose mistress declines to gobble them up for good, revelling instead in the feeble sounds that tumble out each time a single grain of sand touches their skins.

Labib Azer married Leila Anton in a wedding attended by high officials, businessmen and stars of stage and screen. They danced having first drunk copiously. By five am at this riotous celebration no one cared who was drunk and who was sober. As he danced with her, his touch became more sensual, just like a teenager, a fool. He reached out to feel between her thighs and she appeared to enjoy it. Upon her bed she gave moans aplenty. Despite the booze that they’d imbibed, neither laughed. It was as though they were engaged in some deadly serious activity. Pleasure was had, too. He went to sleep before her. For a long while she stared at him and stayed awake. She didn’t sleep till ten and woke at twelve. Just two hours sleep, but in those two hours she dreamed what a normal woman would take a full ten hours to dream. Her dream was intense and compressed.

I dreamed that I went back to my old school.

Nothing new in that. Lots of people—at least those who got their education in schools—dream as adults that they’ve gone back to the schools they attended when young. Usually such dreams come upon people at times of stress: the recurring dream of undergoing some impossible examination by committee, or of being late for the exam, or of going to school naked to spend your dream school day either trying to fool others that you’re wearing clothes like them or in desperate attempts to cover your nakedness.

However, my school dream on this occasion was, in one aspect, realistic. In the dream I was an adult, my age as it is now. I was trying to convince the administration to accept me back, if only as an affiliate student, sitting in on classes as one can at university. It was my intention to revisit those days long-gone in order to make good some mistake that had happened in the past. In the dream the school year was about to start, just as it was in the real September 2008.

What was left unclear in the dream—or rather, what was at stake—was: Would I, having received the administration’s by-no-means-easily-won consent (which I did), would I be placed with my contemporaries or a new year-group made up of teens, an aging failure in their midst? The dream ended before an answer could be provided to this question, one I didn’t ask myself during the dream itself. Nevertheless, the fundamental premise here, for which sake I was returning, was that I was to re-enroll to correct some supposed blunder which had occurred in the past and which, it seemed, had tainted my life thereafter with something akin to a curse or brand or at the very least a species of misfortune it would have possible to avoid.

In that unknown quantity resided the dreamlike nature of the dream. The details that preceded this question were, every one, quite capable of taking place in the real world. It was eminently possible to go as an adult back to your old school and persuade the administration to accept your re-enrollment under whatever classification or category, and in permissive educational systems (and after you had paid the obligatory charges, of course) they might well accept. But to return as an adult in order to enroll in that former time, alongside your old school mates? Here, that incredible logic peculiar to dreams intervened to snip out a life of years gone by, to bind two mutually irreconcilable times, to set a multitude of impulses in motion to service a single, obscure desire in the heart of one ex-pupil, dreaming.

Like someone mixing cement with a little plaster, my psychiatrist Dr. Sulwan stirred the two Egyptian schools of Al Rakhawi and Okasha in with a touch of Freud, that her scientific discourse might be that much sturdier:

“The dream contains symbols that stand for incidents or problems that have occurred at different stages of your life but which might return in the dream contiguous to one another, in the form of these symbols, enabling you on some level—your conscious mind completely unaware—to crack that code and helping your psychological apparatus overcome these problems.”

For a long while she examined me from behind her spectacles, moving her pen like a cigarette between fingers and lips, and said: “Looked at like this, your dreams themselves are highly symbolic…”

She reminded me of an old dream I’d told her about. In it, I chanced across a cassette containing eight songs, four to a side, the songs closest to my heart over the course of my life. The cassette itself was of exceptionally high-quality, matt-black plastic with the hue and feel of ebony. Most of the songs, maybe all, existed in my office, but split between a plethora of tapes consigned to oblivion among shelves and dust, and happening on this cassette in the dream had the quality of recovering some worth now lost, or scattered, say. And had it been in that same dream or a subsequent one that I’d eventually lost the cassette and come awake even as I rummaged through the shelves in search of it? Awake, I was sure—still am perhaps—that once upon a time I’d actually held this ebony tape in my hands.

She said: “Do you remember? I was treating you for depression at the time and you had this feeling that your life was disintegrating, that you were losing your friends one by one, but you never lost anything except the tape in your dream and a few notes here and there out of your tiny salary on treatment sessions and Prozac.”

I went on talking. Dr. Sulwan was pacing back and forth across the room listening to me. I told her that I left the school in the dream and went to sit at a nearby café and ordered a cold bottle of no-longer-sold Sinalco—just like I did as a kid in the eighties—and began surveying the schoolkids kicking around the neighbourhood like someone examining his own past. And again, I asked her what it signified.

She said: “Returning to an old place is a central idea in your life and writing. Didn’t you once write a poem about teenagers who returned, predestined, to a place where they committed some violent folly? And that other poem, about a person who feels implicated in a crime that took place before he was born, so he visits the scene like an old participant. Within you there’s a sense of profound guilt over something unknown, a peculiar type of guilt unleavened by regret, as though at one and the same time you blame, and are complicit with, yourself.

Dr. Sulwan came back and sat at her desk, wrote something with a pen in her file and said that things didn’t seem too serious, that I must start, gradually, to wean myself from the anxiety medication, and set a date for the next appointment the following month.

From Dr. Sulwan’s clinic in Zamalek I walked back to my place of work at the Television and Radio Building on the Nile Corniche in Maspero. That evening, gentle autumn breezes came over the river from the north and as I paced along the 15^th of May Bridge I thought of what the doctor had said about the way the mind cured itself through dreams and a line of verse came to me: And when love’s zephyr scorched me and fled,/ The winds of darkness were my cure. Abdel Wahhab singing The Immortal Nile. The whole way I repeated it over and over, at times belting out the words, at times just singing the tune or whistling. It seemed to me, walking over the bridge, humming this song, all about me the city’s lights and their reflections in the Immortal Nile, that at that instant some meaning was wrapping itself around my whole life or an obscure meshing taking place between an abstract conception of life’s grand meanings and my present motion, an ordinary citizen crossing the bridge by night on his way to work.

I had an all-nighter in the editing suite on the fourth floor, putting together an episode of Auteur Cinema, which I produced. I didn’t come off the bridge directly across from the Television Building but opted to slip into the neighbourhood of Boula Aboulella in order to buy a few fuul and taamiya sandwiches for myself and the editor who’d be staying up with me, then to enter the building through the rear entrance.

The episode we’d be editing tonight was on the American director Robert Zemeckis. The editor, an intellectual by the standards of his tribe, caught me off guard: Could Robert Zemeckis be considered an auteur?

In previous episodes we’d had the advantage of nearly a dozen names, all bona-fide auteurs: the Swedish High Priest, the Russian Prophet, through to the three Italian sorcerers, the Catalan Surrealist, the lords of the Nouvelle Vague in France, the American New Wave, until all avenues for obtaining film by directors whose fame dwindled the deeper they plunged into the poetics of their craft were exhausted.

Zemeckis was not an auteur exactly, I told him, but necessity was the mother of invention and Zemeckis, though quite clearly a commercial director, had himself written his most famous and successful film, Back To The Future, a flawless film by the criteria of commercial cinema… In the end I made him to understand that the programme must go on, so it might complete its run and so we might earn our daily crust. He had no intention of arguing, just to gently have his say on the subject, instead of working on the editing like a donkey carrying another man’s books… and of course, he was in the right.

First, we sat and ate our fuul and taamiya sandwiches, drank two cups of tea with two cigarettes—despite management’s stern warnings against eating, drinking and smoking inside the editing suites—and started work at around one in the morning. The work didn’t require great mental effort on my part since I’d prepared in advance. All I had to do was make sure the filmed material followed the order of the script I had drawn up. This involved laying down a recording of the presenter as she read out what I’d written for her, followed by a film clip. The same operation is repeated three or four times and we have a thirty-minute episode ready for broadcast. Nor does it require great skill on the part of the editor, no more than the proverbial cut and paste.

All the presenter’s introductions were recorded on one tape and all the clips from Zemeckis’ films on another so he all he had to do was combine the two on the master tape, the tape that would make its way, via a number of bureaucratic procedures, to the broadcast unit.

The two main films I dealt with in the episode were Back To The Future and Forest Gump. In the first of these, baby-faced Canadian actor Michael J Fox plays a teenager from the 1980s, troubled by his father’s feeble personality. Using a time machine invented by his friend the mad scientist, he is able to travel back to the 1950s when his father and mother were his age and in his very same year at school. Shameful chance encounters almost lead his mother to fall in love with him and she drifts away from the incompetent student who’s been distracting her: his future father. MJ forces their paths to cross: in the event of their relationship failing the very possibility of his own future existence is placed in jeopardy. In a family portrait from the 1980s that he carries with him his features fade away as in the 1950s his future father and mother part ways. In one scene, MJ is playing a guitar at a party in his parents’ school and, swept up in the moment, he forgets himself, speeding up until his playing resembles the as-yet-unknown rock music. One of the school’s black workers hears him and rushes off to call a relative, none other than the inventor of Rock ‘n’ Roll Chuck Berry, to tell him that he’s found the tune he’s been looking for. The visitor from the future inspires his new contemporaries with what is to be pioneering.

The same theme was explored by Zemeckis in his most successful film, Forest Gump, when he made the protagonist’s spastic walk the inspiration for Elvis Presley’s dancing. Zemeckis’ everyday heroes intervene unwittingly in the making of history. Thus, Forest Gump the table-tennis player, returning from a visit to China as part of the historic ping-pong diplomacy, meets John Lennon on a television show and unintentionally gifts him the words to Imagine.

I stated that Forest Gump was an American reworking of Voltaire’s Candide: the naive hero floating over the surface of history like the feather Zemeckis has drifting down at the film’s start. I stated that the United States of the twentieth century was the Germany and France of the eighteenth as conceived by Voltaire. Candide and Gump negotiate all the twists and turns of their times, join wars and love one woman from the start, only to find, by the end, their beloved girls broken by the vicissitudes of time. Years later Candide comes across his sweetheart Cunegonde in her Turkish exile, grown foully ugly, while at the end of the film, and after a parallel journey, Gump finds Jenny overseas, stricken with AIDS.

“But under cover of his story,” said Rami the editor, “Candide meant to drive home the philosophy voiced by Candide’s instructor at his uncle’s castle in Westphalia, which holds that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds, and that is something that doesn’t appear in the film at all.”

Yet again, Rami had dazzled me with his culture (which had no business being so self-evident) and I would find no better response than to repeat within his earshot that proverbial wisdom in perfect French: “Le meilleur des mondes possibles.”

We finished the edit around six in the morning and descended to the street half asleep, parting company at the building’s entrance. I took a taxi that drove down the Nile-side road for twenty minutes then deviated in towards my house in Maadi. I changed my clothes, drank a warm cup of milk and surrendered to a deep sleep. All of a sudden and with no preamble, I was back at Dr. Sulwan’s clinic, telling her about that incident long ago, the one I had forgotten.

She was sitting at her desk, listening, and I was saying that I had left the school at the end of that distant day, back in second year Secondary, riding my bike, my books tied to the back seat. Out in the street, the instant I reached the first turning, I found them standing there: Dalia’s brother Khaled, a student at the Military Academy, and his gigantic friend Maged Al Abrashi. They blocked the road and forced me a halt. No sooner had I dismounted than Maged caught me with a violent punch to the face that sent my glasses flying and made my nose bleed, then pushed me with all his strength and I fell to the ground. Khaled kicked me in the side and said, “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her?” My friends saw the scene as they come out of the school gate and came running, but Khaled and Maged had made their escape, fleeing on the back of a motorcycle. My friends picked me up off the floor and Hisham and Mohammed Torki took me home, Hisham—bless him—wheeling the bike the whole way.

At this point, Dr. Sulwan got up from her desk, walked around behind the chair where I sat and I felt her hand on my shoulder, a sympathetic touch, gentle pressure. “Come with me,” she said. I exited the examining room with her then she tucked my arm under hers and we walked down a long corridor with bolted doors on either side (I’d never realised her clinic was this big) until we reached a room at the far end, nothing less than an enormous editing suite. The editing array within was like the organ of a palatial cathedral in some medieval city: three impressive screens, Home-Theatre size, with gold and silver buttons on keyboards of black wood.

Dr. Sulwan sat me down on a chair and took something from her bag—a video cassette, plastic with the feel of ebony—and said, “We’ll get past this beating and the wounds it’s left in you,” then placed the cassette in the player and pressed a button. I appeared on one of the screens, wounded with torn clothes, walking between Hisham and Mohammed Torki. Then she pressed another button and the image froze. Then a third and the frames began to run backwards and, at some specific instant, the doctor cracked her knuckles and with a sudden movement shut the apparatus down. “We begin from here,” she said, then pressed the play and record buttons together.

I saw myself on the day of the beating, but in a moment prior, early on in the school day (after the second lesson, perhaps). I’d resolved to bunk off school. I tucked my books under my arm and headed for my bike parked up beside the wall. I secured the wooden crossbar with a chain and lock, planning to leave it overnight at school and pick it up tomorrow when it was time to go home, and went outside into life’s welcoming arms. I bought a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes for forty-five pence and decamped to the Tourist Moon café in the Al Thakanat neighbourhood close by the school. I ordered a coffee medium-sweet, took out my folder and decided to work on the novel I was then writing: A Hole in the Head.

The novel was about a character much like me. I set him down at the time of the ‘67 War, a recruit coming home after six years to find that his sweetheart—who closely resembled Dalia—had married. So he passes the time sitting at a café convinced that his head has a hole in it, which he can’t explain. I was thinking about what I would do with my hero next, he who had grown old without beginning his life, when I became aware of a man of around forty, sitting next to me and scrutinizing me.

I was flustered and shut my folder against his prying, only to find him smiling and telling me: “Don’t worry, you’ll be a writer for sure, but you will never see Dalia again.”

“Who are you?” I asked uncertainly, “And how do you know this?”

He said with his smile, “Have you forgotten the old lesson?”

“What lesson?” I said.

“Le meilleur des mondes possibles; the best of all possible worlds.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“Only here, in this virtual time, are you able to see me.”

He waved the bottle of Sinalco that he’d drunk in my face, saying, “Your health…” then the screen clouded and faded slowly to black.

I was aware of Dr. Sulwan’s body pressing against mine as the screen dimmed, then our contact turned to a heated embrace and I turned with her onto the sofa and…

I woke with a powerful erection. The clock on my mobile phone showed one in the afternoon. About six hours had passed since I’d returned home. The first thing I did was get Dr. Sulwan on the phone and say to her, “I want to arrange an urgent appointment. Great things have happened and I must tell you about them.” She told me that her clinic closed at eleven p.m. and she would expect me ten minutes after that in the office. I hung up in high delight and went to make morning coffee with milk, heart dancing with joy. In the kitchen a fine thread of grief stole in: Where, in fact, had my bike gone?

“What’ll we do, boss?”

No reply.

“We’ve been through so much.”

No reply.

“A whole year. We can’t take it. All this happening.”

He turns to face him: “Forget it, friend. Forget it.”

******

On the 12^th of February, one day after the abdication, a letter is sent to one of the youth of the revolution. The letter contained just six words: “Good morning. I am the next president of Egypt.”

Death cruises the streets. The country burns. Blood, the reek of gas and fire and scorched chassis. And suddenly, a Facebook page is set up, its title: The Next President of Egypt. The page consists of only two images, the first a slogan, God is Great, Glory to Egypt, the second a portrait, a portrait of a person sitting in a darkened room, his features unclear though he appears to be veiled. The page is empty but for comments by some kids. The kids think it’s a set-up. Mystery surrounds the situation.

In a few weeks, the Next President of Egypt’s popularity is unparalleled. Nobody knows his name and address, what he looks like, but in all the polls that try to gauge the popularity of the presidential candidates, the next president of Egypt wins hands down. The next president does not speak: monolithically silent.

And suddenly he speaks. In a video on YouTube:

“The old world cannot go on. The new world shall emerge from out of the old, as an eggshell shatters and the egg emerges from within. That is all.”

The Next President of Egypt really was veiled. Nobody knows what he looks like. Most likely, because his face is afflicted with acne, he’s missing an eye, leprosy: nobody knows.

The skin complaint story spread day after day and as it spread the Next President’s popularity grew. The proportion of those under his spell swelled. One might say that by the end of the year, the next president of Egypt had been transformed into the public figure who enjoyed the greatest unanimity of support from all sectors of society. Nobody could say a bad word about him. He was transformed: a part of Egyptians’ culture.

With just a single exception. During one demonstration a man appeared carrying a sign that read Down with the Next President and laughing. The photograph nettled everybody but even so nobody raised any objection. Simply put, he was seen as a madman. Who would oppose the next president of Egypt? You even know him to oppose him? People swapped jokes about him and in no time he was forgotten and brushed aside.

What became of this man? Not a thing. He was still around. Still mocking himself whenever he carried his sign. And so evaporated what we might call the opposition, without any action on the part of the Next President of Egypt.

This was how he operated: Victory through the mind. He who opposes me opposes that he doesn’t know and he who supports me is, in brief, on the side of history. There must be a next president of Egypt and I am he. I am history, nature, physics; I am moving forward and progress and the flow of life. The rational mind has been victorious over all that oppose it: madness, the unconscious, feelings. The rational mind has crushed those who stand in its way, with the blessing of all, rulers and ruled alike. There is no escaping the web-like domination of the mind, the fox mind, the snake mind, foxlike, snakelike all at once.

The people are being killed, now. In the streets and houses and public places you find corpses whose source you do not know. Fire consumes everyone.

Something satanic was taking place. Authentically satanic. Satan’s world meshed with our own. The world of two dimensions meshed with the world of three. Great rents opened in the fabric of the universe and anyone drawn into these holes quickly lost their minds and withered, transformed in no time into two-dimensional beings.

Egyptians can’t stand all this. Egyptians are the best-natured people in the world. The Next President of Egypt was never silent and likewise, never spoke. He appeared in one video, looking out at the expectant audience, then smiled and the video ended. His popularity grew. It was impossible for anyone to do anything in the face of this popularity. Could anyone stand there, like our mad friend, and shout that he was against the Next President of Egypt?

The mind is victorious.

******

“The people are tired, boss.”

“The time has come for them to rest.”

And he smiles.

******

The Next President is without features and without voice—his voice is distorted—and without political affiliation. The Next President of Egypt has never said anything over which two people can disagree. And yet, since he first appeared, the old world really has been peeled like an egg. But the new world has not emerged. All this blood flowing for nothing, for a blank.

What people have understood from the next president’s words is that rage is no solution:

“Do not be angry. Terror is the solution. Rage is no solution.”

Satan possesses us. The two-dimensional world returns to attack our own at every moment: when we hear strange sounds in our lonely homes, when evening dissolves, at the slightest contact with any dead body, at the sound of an unknown language.

For a whole year terror was the people’s lot. Freedom from terror was not an option. At times, it seemed, the two-dimensional world was so firmly affixed to the three-dimensional that it was impossible to conceive of breaking the bond. Through terror, the Next President of Egypt was able to cultivate conflict. The mind versus terror. Terror is a vast wild beast, sprawling limitlessly away; the mind returns sprawling beasts to their natural limits. Become more and more terrified. The more you are the closer you come to the mind. The day rises out of night. The egg emerges from the eggshell.

For a whole year, people circled each other. The two dimensional world attacked them. People collapsed into the gaping black holes between the worlds. The reek of petrol everywhere.

The Next President is axiomatic now. The thing most axiomatic in the minds of the population. People scrawl phrases on walls, like, The situation will only stabilize with the coming of the Next President of Egypt, The Next President of Egypt is the president who will rule Egypt, like it or not. The walls explode. Stones fly over the heads of human beings. Corpses swell on street corners surrounded by flies. Suddenly, wild beasts are everywhere, phosphorescent brutes whose bodies weep sticky, greasy fluid. What links these beasts with the Next President of Egypt? Are they with him or against him? Terror leaves no room for answers.

It goes on, much further on, until the longest video yet in which the Next President of Egypt speaks:

“We will forget all that has happened. We will forget the horror of what has happened. The time has come to let the curtain fall. The time has come to start anew. All that has taken place has never happened. We will dive into forgetfulness that we might build everything. We will derive all values from the heart of forgetfulness. We will pluck out the pearl.”

During the broadcast, no one speaks. The entire country is bewitched. The entire country is ready to pluck out the pearl.

The Next President’s supporters start holding training sessions for losing memory and the sessions bear fruit. People start to forget all that has happened. The terror begins to disappear. The Next President of Egypt appears, gesturing behind the YouTube screen, then the video ends. The country starts to emerge from the dark tunnel. Is it the end of the world? Certainly it is, not in the sense that the world will pass out of existence but rather that hereafter it will be forever altered. The world enters Utopia, immutability; no time, no place.

The presidential elections are held and the Next President wins with one hundred per cent of the vote. If one hundred and one were possible he would have won that too, without a single instance of fraud. We are here now with thirty years of elections behind us. We are in the final phase of the world’s formation. People are fascinated, listening to their president after forgetting all that has happened, after the world has split away to become three-dimensional once more. The whole world’s in its place, now: the two-dimensional in its place and the three-dimensional in its place. East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. The rational logic of historical progress.

And so the new world appears, without a soul being aware of it. Everyone has forgotten the prophecy and they pay no heed to its fulfillment. All the people remember is a scene from an advertisement:

Chef Maged is preparing a dish of egg and beans, an Egyptian classic. He grips a tennis racquet. With the racquet he launches the boiled egg against the wall and it rebounds. He hits it further. And so on. Five shots in succession, the sound cranked-up—Takk! Tokk! Tikk!—then he catches the egg in his hand and dexterously brushes at it. The egg is now perfectly ready: gleaming, completely stripped of its shell. This is Déjà vu. No one knows what this scene means to them—they have forgotten everything—but the scene is rich in meaning. The egg is the hard core of the new world.

The next president of Egypt appears. His face is firm. His tone is firm. His voice is full of hope.

“Now we begin the world. Nothing has happened. Nothing will. We hang suspended in a bubble. We take the tool and peel the egg. Enjoy.”

The Egyptians’ eyes are fixed on the screen. The Egyptians are fascinated.  

Miracle

This night is freighted with miracles:

The doorstep, studded with thousands of footfalls,

The lamp, trimming its share of the light,

The bed, unsheathed against a future desire,

The books, cast down in expectant terror;

Music paves the street from behind a window that sighs,

The air is haunted with passers-by

—over there a body, bundled up and flaring with seclusion—

Who will point his darling girl to where the heart lies

That he might shape his own miracle?

******

And suddenly

And suddenly

You’re sure you don’t know the streets as you should

All you’ve learnt is how to walk with a crime in your pocket, throw a salutation to the first cop that passes

Then search for a darkened street

In which you spark what’s left of the memory for which people envy you.

Hermes or Yehya will be with you.

The simplest principles of physiognomy did not serve you

Scrutinizing those who sprouted from the asphalt:

Multitudinous are they, inflexibly set

And know nothing of pain’s locales

Nor the rigours of lamenting the self;

Them—the ones who follow the evening news

And watch the late flick—

They’re your coffin knit from life as usual.

You let down your guard even as their rot

Robbed you of the ability to breathe:

It is the downfall!

You walk down streets all alike,

Through a time loosed from its hobble,

Your companions skeletons, clowns, a book you haven’t read

Giving yourself hope for a torture less than this,

Cries creeping from a distant place

You called Yourself,

As though you played some quester after truth.

You are here

Where Hell is fathomless.

The human machine churns out its demons

And you are terrified.

******

Once and again

One time

I lay on my back

And looked at a time-honoured let-down

Called the sky.

I did not know at the time

That it was a blend of steams, gases, dust,

Dust,

This everlasting drunkard

Hovering in the void

To delude us with beauty.

We are failed clumps of dust

Awaiting affection from other dust.

If I possessed the power of my own making

I’d be a raining cloud

To cry without anyone growing sad.

I’ve no idea how joy might come about

Other than by winning a war I hadn’t entered

And people’s eyes that pierce my skin

Are blind to my loneliness…

And another time

I wept like the horses

And walked in the streets of Cairo

Waiting on a miracle that will not happen.

I want to be at ease

But walking is the furthest thing from ease

And the two feet practice weeping as their trade,

My two feet weep as does my heart.

I want to be at ease

But I am alone.

I found myself standing in the heart of darkness on a train platform under the open sky.

I’d been at the wake of a work colleague’s father in a village in Baheira province, some three hundred kilometres from Cairo and had been too late to catch the minibus in which I’d arrived in the company of the rest of the co-workers, who had come from the capital to pay their condolences. Unable to make the return journey with them I was forced to return alone on the country train.

There is a rail network that connects the villages of the Delta to junctions in the towns and capital cities of its provinces. I had no idea where in the network this station lay but I knew that I was in the far northwest, on the border between cultivated land and the desert.

It was about nine in the evening yet in the countryside it seemed like the depths of night. The station was a single uncovered platform with a single strip of track before it, which meant the train travelled along it in both directions. I was standing alone at the station and all about me the corn stretched out over vast distances. Though it was summer, a thick layer of fog rested over the fields, which emitted the electric whine of hovering insects.

There was a solitary, feebly shining lamppost on the platform, a sphere of mosquitoes surrounding its halo of light. The lamp would fade out for minutes at a time and the mosquitoes would fly off, to return as the light bloomed anew after taking its break. In the sky was a crescent moon that far from dispelling the air of desolation only deepened it. Mobile phones still lay in the future.

I smoked getting on for half a pack of cigarettes, alternating between a seat on the wooden bench and standing at the platform’s edge. Recalling some lines of poetry by Amal Donqol—At the village stations insomnia’s trains pull in/ And the wings of dust draw up with the languor of imminence—I took to entertaining myself by repeating them and fancied I saw the train approaching, swaying indistinct through the darkness… but it was only fancy.

From across the fields the sound of yelping or barking reached my ears. Wild dogs, were they? Wolves? Maybe even hyenas. I reflected that such predators abounded in these desert bordered regions, but comforted myself with the thought that I stood on a station platform, that the station and the tracks belonged to the world of the government, that wolves and hyenas belonged to the wild, and that these two worlds rarely intersected, even in the countryside. Perhaps if I were to step down to that world in the fields the hyenas would attack me, but up here…

After a while the howling started to recede and the fading sound, the blanketing fog, the sinister moonlight and the fields’ narcotic fragrance combining together, I entered into a state that resembled a dream. Fear subsided. In truth, I hadn’t been afraid. I was, perhaps, amusing myself with fear, with finding myself in a situation so perfectly suited to it. Yet the rituals of condolence, the mouthwatering food we tucked away at the wake and the family’s attempts to deal with the ordeal by losing themselves in formalities… all this put paid to the dream’s spell and left me as fixed in reality as a nail in a lump of wood. And indeed, I was a nail, all at sea on a station’s platform.

The family of our friend—the one hosting the wake—were originally from the Saeed in southern Egypt, but had settled in Baheira decades back. For this reason, the ceremonies had a predominantly Saeedi flavour. The men were constantly offering us cigarettes: no sooner were the ones in our hands finished than one of them would come up proffering his pack and begging off was never on. I don’t like to write too much about smoking—I view it as one of the overworked clichés of modern Arabic literature—but the sheer quantity of the cigarettes I inhaled that day, either at the wake or nervously out at the station, left me no choice.

The women of the family, who had come with their men from the Saeed, were gathered in a room alongside the hall where we sat and their weeping and wailing was clearly audible. At first the keening was an undifferentiated jumble, then one of them soared clear with a scream and piercing ululation and then we heard the adeed, the dirge of the south, pure, like a song innate to every heart, that continued to sound inside my head even as I stood at the station:

“Whose grave is this, the herd now tramples in?

The stranger’s grave, who leaves his kith and kin.”

We da gabr meen illy al bagar daasoo

Gabr el ghareeb illy faat naasoo

the wailing woman had sung, stretching out the ee in ghareeb and the aa in naasoo until it became gabr el ghareeeeeeb illy faat naaaasoo. I pondered the etymological connections of baqar and qabr—cows and grave—and an ancient verse also popped into my head: Harb’s grave lies in a desolate spot/And by Harb’s grave no other grave lies. It is said that the verse is anonymous, found inscribed on a tombstone all alone in the Arabian sands, just as it is said that the statue of the idol Hubal once stood carved from red marble on the desert fringe beside the shore of the Red Sea. There is a kinship between the Saeed and the Arabian deserts, like the one between their poetry.

I stand waiting for a train that does not arrive at a station gone astray. At the wake they informed me that a train would definitely pass through tonight but they weren’t sure of the exact time, or rather: the train never arrived on time.

At the far end of the platform I spied the figure of a man sporting a tarboush in the old style, or at least that is what it looked like in the moonlight, by the pale lamplight. I didn’t notice him arriving; he was suddenly there on the platform. He must be an employee from the provincial offices of the venerable railway company: a guard or a ticket inspector; the station manager, even.

I gathered myself and decided to go over and ask him about the coming train; whether it was coming at all. The journey from where I was to where he was meant crossing the entire platform from one end to the other. When I got there I discovered a short man in a suit and a tarboush whose red colouring was visibly faded despite the poor light and to my surprise he was dapper, quite the opposite of the moth-eaten mien one expected in aged functionaries of his sort.

“Excuse me,” I asked him. “When will the train arrive?”

“Going where?” he asked me.

“Cairo,” I said.

“You’re at the wrong station,” he said.

“What do you mean? They brought me here and said that the train stops here.”

He said, “It’s the wrong station for time, not place…” then began moving backwards by degrees, as though gliding on tiny wheels, until, still facing me, he got down off the platform and bit by bit was engulfed by the fog.

I was conscious of a high-pitched whistle and a dazzling light approaching from the north. Ancient and decrepit, the train was pulling in.

I ate a lot, I smoked a lot and the four elements smote me.