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

I’m writing only for those who know Mr. Gouda. Those who haven’t met him will never understand what he represents.

Never did he feel embarrassed about his shoes. They were made of cloth, but he always claimed that this kind of shoe was easy on his feet. In fact, Mr. Gouda would sometimes express to anyone who might care to listen his amazement at how other people could stand wearing leather shoes in such terrible heat.

Likewise, thanks to the efforts of his wife, Busayna, his pants always looked fairly smart.

The problem was the shirts. Mr. Gouda owned three, which he wore in rotation through the week, and the white one was threadbare. If it had been torn, Mr. Gouda could have dispensed with it altogether, but it was merely threadbare, meaning that it had that certain scratchiness that afflicts a shirt once it has become worn out and the little threads that emerge and dangle free of the weave. Despite this, on some gray and gloomy days, Mr. Gouda was compelled to wear the white shirt, and last Thursday was one of those days.

That morning, Mr. Gouda’s behavior changed completely.

It may seem an exaggerated reaction, but I have to tell those who have not experienced the effect of a threadbare shirt on a man’s behavior that when Mr. Gouda spoke to his colleagues that morning, it was in almost inaudible tones and when he ordered his morning coffee, he was more than usually polite, saying, “A medium-sweet coffee, if you’d be so kind, Borai,” instead of uttering his normal shout of, “Medium-sweet, Borai!”

I also have to tell you that Mr. Gouda spent most of the day behind his desk pretending to occupy himself with files of no importance. He responded tersely to the chatter of his colleagues and found himself more than normally predisposed to agree with the opinions of those who spoke to him; even soccer, Mr. Gouda’s favorite topic of conversation, failed to engage his interest that morning. Mr. Gouda felt mortified and was so embarrassed he couldn’t decide where to put his hands, sometimes placing them on the desk, sometimes letting them hang at his sides, and finally folding them over his chest, in which position he tried his best to keep them for the rest of the day. No one knows why Mr. Gouda yielded to an irresistible desire to examine his colleagues’ clothes so closely but whenever he noticed that one of them was looking shabby, Mr. Gouda would feel a secret, guilty relief.

It was indeed a wearisome day, and it would have been—I repeat, would have been—possible for the day to have passed without anything further happening to increase Mr. Gouda’s anxiety and distress, but it seems that it is by evil laws that the world is governed, for at about one o’clock a handsome, smartly dressed young man of not more than thirty entered the Monitoring Department and directed his steps straight toward the desk of Mr. Gouda. He was carrying papers that he wanted to have stamped—and stamping papers was about all that Mr. Gouda’s job consisted of—and Mr. Gouda got the stamp out of the drawer, as he always did, and prepared himself to stamp. Mr. Gouda has often, subsequently, thought about what the young man did, and has come up with the following interpretation: the youth belonged to a certain category of men who carry about with them something vaguely feminine, something unshakeable that one does not notice at first but which reveals itself as soon as one asks one of them, for example, about the price of cloth, or he boasts of his skill as a cook or at buying fruit, or takes longer than necessary to polish his glasses. Anyway, Mr. Gouda quickly finished stamping the papers but the young man was polite and friendly—as most men of that sort are—and a delightful conversation sprang up between the young man and Mr. Gouda that lasted some minutes. When the young man got up to go, Mr. Gouda pressed him strongly to stay and the young man sat down again, his face wearing a warm and open expression, and gave Mr. Gouda a cigarette of an imported brand, which Mr. Gouda kissed in grateful acceptance, and the pleasure of smoking the cigarette added still further to the agreeable atmosphere. A warm sensation stole into Mr. Gouda’s heart and he forgot all about his shirt and removed his hands from his chest and found a place to put them on either side of his chair. Eventually, being eager to show his friendliness, Mr. Gouda stood up and made a show of looking for the office boy so that he could order some refreshment for “the gentleman.” All of a sudden one of the young man’s feminine avatars possessed him and, crying out, “Just a moment, my dear Mr. Gouda!” he stood up and gazed intently at Mr. Gouda’s shirt, and then, without saying a word, stretched out his hand and with slender, well-schooled fingers plucked a thread off the white shirt. Then he looked at Mr. Gouda and gave him an innocent smile.

The young man hadn’t meant anything by the gesture. It was his custom to reach out to other people’s clothes and fasten an undone button or pluck off an unwanted thread. He liked everything to look proper. He couldn’t bear to do nothing about a twisted collar or allow a badly tied necktie to pass. Sometimes, when he caught sight of a small leaf sticking to the hair of the man he was talking to, he would even, whoever it might be, reach out an arm, pull his head toward him, and set to searching through his hair with his fingers until he could pick out the offending leaf and fling it away. Then, and only then, he would sigh contentedly and ask his interlocutor with the greatest politeness, “What were you saying, my dear sir?”

That was the way the young man was. He couldn’t imagine that the removal