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

“What’s so bad about that? Lots of babies die. It’d just be one more gone to join the rest.”

8

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

Their response to this uncomfortable fact was to ignore her. Their ignoring of her was a punishment they imposed on my grandmother for still being there. My Uncle Abbas would sit with my mother for ages, talking, laughing, and drinking tea, and never once turn to where my grandmother lay in the same room. He had completely lost his awareness of her presence and my grandmother would remain in the middle of the laughter and talk, lying on her bed, silent, staring at the ceiling through her crooked glasses and with eyes over which the cataracts of age had crept. She might lie there for hours and then suddenly do something, like ask the others a question attributable to her weak powers of concentration and her scattered thoughts. It might be the hottest part of the summer and my grandmother would ask my mother to cover her with a blanket because she felt cold. Sometimes she would address my Uncle Abbas as though he were Huda, and sometimes she would try to get out of bed and fail and keep trying until she almost fell over. Then someone would have to jump up and help her, my aged grandmother’s aim being to spread anxiety and spoil the atmosphere that had been created without her, to remind those present that she was old and weak and in need of a care that was not forthcoming because they were shirking their duties. Some months previously, my grandmother had started to wet herself, and my uncle had brought a doctor to solve this new problem. After examining my grandmother, the doctor came out, and I could tell from his face that he understood nothing. “Old age,” he said. “There is no treatment.” Then he prescribed her a medication of which seven drops were to be given her every night with a dropper. Before Huda gave it to my grandmother, my mother yelled at her vehemently, “Don’t put seven. Give her ten, or twelve. Make her stop all that nastiness of hers.”

The times that my grandmother chose to wet herself were carefully timed—such as in front of visitors, whether relatives or strangers. Right at the moment when the conversation was getting enjoyable and the visitors had settled themselves into their seats, my grandmother would suddenly urinate and discomfort and depression would reign. Once a young woman relative of ours called Nadia was visiting when she saw my grandmother get up, an expression of tranquility clothing her ancient features, and then bend her head like a guilty child while the urine poured down, soaking her clothes and streaming over the floor.

When Nadia beheld this, she stared for a moment as though she didn’t understand, then burst into hot, vehement tears, and my mother and Huda got furious with my grandmother. Their cries mixed but my mother’s voice was louder and she could be heard saying, “Shame on you, woman! We’ve been telling you to go to the damned bathroom since the