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

acrid taste burns my throat and the effect begins to spread, I roam beyond new horizons and I learn. The truth is one and sempiternal and from it different scattered forms are born that are linked by fragile threads that cannot be seen from afar. I read about Hamlet, Ali ibn Abi Talib, Socrates, Eva Peron, Jehan Sadat, Aisha bint Abi Bakr, ancient Rome, Baghdad, and New York.* Read what you want, draw close and gaze, and the connecting threads become visible to you and the reality of a wonderful unity is revealed to you. From time to time, I have breakfast with my mother. I look on as, with bestial greed, she devours four spoons of honey, then drinks a glass of milk and eats a plate of eggs. My mother talks to me about the mistakes doctors make in diagnosis and asserts that our forefathers didn’t know disease because they used to feed themselves well. She smiles imploringly and says, “You know, Isam, I don’t believe a word of what the doctor says! I don’t have cancer and I’ll live to see him buried, the bastard.”

Then she laughs hard and looks at my face from under her eyelids and I realize that were I to disagree with her or appear sad or even smile in pity, I would be cutting a fine thread that still connects her to some vague hope. I watch her laugh in silence and register in my brain in large letters, “Our abject greed for life is a truly contemptible thing.” Imagine an efficient, energetic employee who loves his work. He makes a salary of a hundred pounds. He has never neglected his work for a single day and he has never been guilty of a lapse. One morning, however, he is surprised to find that his boss, for no reason other than his desire to do so, has reduced his salary to just ten pounds. What would you call such an employee if he didn’t leave the job? Wouldn’t he be contemptible if he continued to work for ten pounds and pretended to his boss that he was content and happy?

If my mother were to take her headscarf off in front of the mirror and look at her head and her drawn, exhausted face, then place in front of herself an old photo from the days when her hair was beautiful and combed out and her smile brilliant, the days of her happiness—were my mother ever to compare the two images and ask, Why? Would she not then refuse and protest? Her weakness is no excuse, because despite it she can always put an end to what is an oppressive and insane injustice. Just a smidgen of courage—just a smidgen and the employee refuses to work for a lower salary. The elephant awaits its end. Muhammad Kurayim refuses to save his life by paying a poll tax to his enemies the French and goes to his death calmly, nobly, triumphantly.* The Athenian know-nothings sentence Socrates to death and when on the night of the execution Plato sneaks in to see him, bringing a plan of escape, the teacher hears his enthusiastic pupil out and refuses to flee and in amazement Plato asks why and Socrates smiles and answers, “Because I have turned my back on this contemptible world.”

10

The end. I was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair. The hairdresser was, as is usually the case, servile, inquisitive, and loquacious. He hated me because I had been visiting his shop for two whole years and he had not yet been able to find out one thing about me. Just my first name. No matter how hard he tried and persisted in trying to drag me into a conversation, I would resist until he gave up in despair and took to cutting my hair in silence. This silence would sometimes be too much for him and he’d talk to the other customers, while I looked down and read. On that particular day, I’d forgotten to bring a book with me to read. I had to read something, so I turned to the magazines arranged on the shelf of the mirror in front of me—back issues of a French magazine called L’Art du Décor. I have no interest in decoration, but I picked up an issue and began to leaf through some of the articles dealing with that subject. There were lots of photos of furniture in various styles. I went through the pages fast and exchanged that issue for another. On the first page of the second magazine I saw it—a picture that I stopped at and which attracted me so much that I still remember it clearly. It was a photo of a bedroom in the modern style—a wide low bed close to the ground covered with a black silk sheet. On the wall there was a large painting representing a large solid nose surrounded by numerous intersecting shadows colored in shades that ranged from white to black. The floor of the room was completely covered with white fur and the intersection of the white and the black seemed wonderful. I contemplated the photo and a beautiful and surprising feeling was released inside me that quickly turned into an overwhelming love. Minutes passed as I savored the beauty in the picture. I tried to turn the page and look at another but I couldn’t; after a moment I’d go back to my first picture. When I had finished getting my hair cut and was paying, I asked, “Can I keep the magazine?”

He agreed at once and with delight as this presented an opportunity to interfere in my life, bursting into a long prattle about French décor and how elegant it was. It wasn’t long before he asked, “Do you want the magazine for the new house, sir? A thousand congratulations, Mr. Isam!”

I freed myself from the hairdresser, tucked the magazine under my arm, and took a taxi home. I was breathless, an adolescent