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

father asked me, as he put on his glasses and looked anxiously at the drawing, “Aren’t the features clear?”

I answered emphatically, “Of course. They’re very clear. But this friend of mine, he’s a communist and you know what adolescents the communists are. He insists you’re a rightist and would never attack Sadat in your cartoons.”

Thus I initiated a long discussion with my father on a topic over which we always disagreed, and which I knew well, even though he sometimes got angry with me and attacked me, made him happy. And in the evening, my father would complain about me to his friends, telling them about his discussion with me and describing me as being—like all my generation—irritable and conceited, and then insert rapidly into the middle of what he was saying, “Just imagine, everyone! Isam tells me that they read Life at the university and that his colleagues got into a fight with him over today’s cartoon.”

Having slipped this sentence in, my father would quickly finish what he was saying, and I could almost feel his anxiety lest anyone disagree with him or call him a liar.

It was summer and Ramadan, and the university was on vacation. Neither I nor my father fasted but we respected my mother’s feelings and observed the Ramadan regime—breaking fast at sunset, eating again before sunrise. I had spent the night with my friends at el-Fishawi’s café, which was crowded and noisy, and returned to the house at three in the morning. My father and mother were seated at the table. My mother was eating her predawn meal and my father was busy devouring a plate of cookies, with tea. I divined, from the looseness of his lips, his vacant look, and the way the crumbs dribbled onto his gallabiya, that he had been smoking hashish. I exchanged a few words with them in passing, then went into my room, and leafed through the newspapers for the coming day, which I had bought in el-Hussein. Then I slept and woke up in the morning to find someone frantically shaking my body. I opened my eyes and found my mother beating her cheeks and pulling at me to get up. I ran after her to my father’s room. He lay naked on the bed and looked as though he was asleep, except that a mumbling sound was coming from his mouth and a feeble movement made his huge body tremble. There was an expression on his face that looked as though he was being pursued by a nightmare from which he was trying, unsuccessfully, to awake. My mother wailed out, “See your father, Isam!”

She bent over him, took him in her arms, and started calling to him. Then she buried her face in his chest and burst into tears. In an hour, the doctor came and, after examining my father carefully, bent down to me and informed me in a whisper that he had suffered an aneurysm. He advised me to take him immediately to the hospital, asked for twenty pounds, which he thrust into his pocket with thanks, and left. The ambulance workers exerted huge efforts with my mother before managing to get my father dressed in a white gallabiya and then they placed him on the stretcher and took him down the stairs, my mother and I behind them. As they took my father through the entryway of the building, Huda, our young maid, suddenly appeared and, with her skinny, nervy body and flying pigtail, started running after the stretcher and leaping round it and screaming.

In the light of the lamp suspended over the bed in the hospital, my father’s face seemed to me to be divided into two halves, one with a bulging eye, opened as far as it could go and blood-shot, and the other defeated and sagging. My father was trying to speak and a vague, suppressed, rattling sound emerged from within him. My mother left me with him and went to ask the hospital administration about something. In the afternoon, friends, relatives, colleagues from work, and others I didn’t know appeared. They spoke to us—my mother and me—of God’s mercy, treatment overseas, and friends of theirs (people they knew very well) who had suffered exactly the same symptoms as my father’s and who had recovered, with God’s help, and now enjoyed the most robust health and happiness. Then the visitors went away, one by one, leaving behind bunches of roses and colored boxes of chocolates, and my mother and I remained seated in front of my father; and when he closed his bulging eye and his breathing became regular, I realized that he had gone to sleep. It was late, perhaps after midnight, when we heard a faint knocking on the door, which opened a little to reveal the face of Uncle Anwar. He was wearing his black working tuxedo with the shiny lapels and under it a white shirt and sagging black bowtie. Uncle Anwar’s eyes roamed the room and then he signaled to me with his hand, so I went outside, followed by my mother, and he heard from us what had happened and asked us in detail about the opinions and prognoses of the doctors. His face was dark and the way he interrupted us as we spoke indicated that he was angry. Soon he put out his cigarette with his shoe and asked my mother if he could see him. He went forward, pushed open the door, and entered, and when he got close to my father I thought I saw a flash of consciousness pass quickly over my father’s eyes, and that he recognized Anwar. This, however, was quickly extinguished and the eye resumed its vacant look. Uncle Anwar laughed loudly and said, “What’s going on, my dear Mr. Abduh? What kind of a stunt is this you’re trying to pull? Do you get a kick out of making us worry or what? Look at you—as strong as a bull! These guys sent people