Friendly Fire, Alaa Aswany [10 ebook reader .TXT] 📗

I prepared myself to ask my father to leave but couldn’t.

“Did you see Shakir’s cartoon in al-Ahram today?”*

“No.”

“You have to see it. It’s very strange. I don’t what’s happened to Shakir—has he gone nuts or what? Do you know what he drew today? A sun’s disc with two lines coming out of it that he’d twisted round each other and underneath he’d written ‘Knitting.’ Get how dumb that is? It’s supposed to be a joke and people expect to laugh when they read it. Laugh at what? At the artist’s stupidity, of course. But Mr. Shakir is of course a well-known artist and al-Ahram pays him eight hundred pounds a month. Even if he turned in a few scribbles, no one could say anything. No, what matters is that Shakir thinks he’s a great artist and if you run into him at the Journalists’ Syndicate he pretends not to know you, or he’ll remember you after a while and say, ‘My dear friend! Please excuse me, but you’ve changed a lot and you know what my mind’s like!’ Of course, he doesn’t try that stuff with me, of all people. He comes right over to me and minds his manners.”

I couldn’t stand it any more so I jumped up. My father seemed taken aback. There was a moment of silence. Then he got up from his chair and said as he turned to go out, just as though we’d just come to the end of an ordinary conversation on an ordinary night,

“Right. Well, I’ll leave you to get some sleep. Good night.”

He took some steps toward the door. I hung my head and looked at the interwoven colors of the design on the carpet and for a moment was overcome by an obscure feeling that my father hadn’t left the room and that he’d come over to me—and when I raised my eyes, there he was standing in front of me, and he stretched out his hand without speaking, put it on my shoulder, looked at me for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, Isam.”

When your father is a weak sick old man who clings onto your hand as you walk down the street next to him, leaning his weight on you for fear of falling over, and the passersby stare at your father’s infirmity and examine you with curious glances that come to rest on your face, how are you likely to feel? You may feel embarrassed at your father’s weakness and you may exaggerate your display of concern so as to garner appreciative looks, or you may talk nastily and cruelly to him because you love him and are sad for his sake and you want him to go back to being the way he was, strong and capable.

Life comes out on Wednesdays and I went to the news vendor in front of the mosque to buy it but he didn’t know of it, and I went to another vendor, in Giza Square, and to a third, and a fourth, and I took a bus to Suleiman Pasha Square and went to the big newsstand there and when the vendor approached me I asked him with a show of indifference, “Have you ever heard of a magazine called Life?”

I spoke to him like this because every time a vendor denied the existence of the magazine for which my father drew, I felt embarrassed and sad. I was expecting that this one wouldn’t know it either and my seemingly indifferent question reduced my embarrassment and placed me and the vendor on the same side—as though I too, in spite of my question, was denying that any such magazine existed. The vendor, however, and to my surprise, knew it and said, “Fifteen piasters.”

I felt relieved and paid the price, and I took the magazine and searched on the last page until I found my father’s name. There was a small square with, at the bottom, the signature “Abd el-Ati.” On the way home, I studied the cartoon. When I got to the house it was two o’clock in the afternoon and my father was still asleep, so I opened the door to his room and entered quietly. Then I swept aside the heavy black curtains and light flooded the space. My father opened his eyes and noticed me, and I said, smiling, “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Isam. What time is it?”

I told him the time and he yawned, stretched his hand out to the bedside table, picked up a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and took a drag that turned into a fit of coughing. I took up a chair, came close, and sat myself in front of him, the magazine in my hand. Tapping it, I said, laughing, “Happy now, my dear sir? That cartoon you did today almost got me sent to the police station!”

Taken aback, my father asked what I meant, so I told him, “No big deal. I got into a fight with a friend of mine over what the cartoon meant.” As I said this I straightened the edge of the carpet with my foot so that I seemed to be speaking about something quite incidental and ordinary that happened all the time.

“Good heavens! You got into a fight?” my father asked me in amazement.

“I want to ask you first. The man in the cartoon today, isn’t he supposed to be Anwar Sadat?”

My father responded, “Yes. Absolutely.”

I let out my breath as though relieved and said, “So I was right.”

My father pulled himself up, rested his back against the head of the bed, and said, worry starting to appear in his eyes, “What’s the story?”

“No big deal. As you know, they read Life at the university, so every Wednesday I have to have this quarrel with my friends. They all look at your cartoon and then they keep pestering me with questions about ‘Does your father mean So-and-so or So-and-so?’ Today, especially, if the drawing hadn’t been Anwar Sadat, the meaning would have changed completely.”

My