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

When the Glass Shatters

1

THE PAPER SELLER SHOUTED, the signal changed, and a black car started off at high speed, almost running over a fat lady wearing a headscarf and causing the lady’s husband to get into a violent altercation with the driver. He seemed to see all this through thick, cold glass—the faces of the passersby, the roar of the traffic, the colors of the fluorescent lights on the storefronts all blending into a distant and distorted backdrop. Everything was outside of him. His mind had come to a stop at one particular instant, which it could not get beyond—a frozen instant of horrified realization permeated by clouds and incoherent sounds, just like that experienced by the mind before drowsiness overwhelms it in that brief, infinitely small portion of time that separates waking from sleeping. When he came to himself again, he was crossing Suleiman Pasha Square, it was after eight o’clock, and the shop owners were pulling down over their doors the elongated metal shutters, painted a uniform gray. Cold air struck his face and he started thinking about a place to go. He remembered a small bar on Emad el-Din Street where he used to drink when he was in college and where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. He turned and walked a few steps in the direction of the bar, but a voice inside his head mocked him, saying that now he looked like a bad actor in a movie by Hasan el-Imam. He slowed his pace and hesitated for a little, but in the end assured himself that he did indeed need a couple of drinks and time to think.

2

It was early and the place empty of all but a few customers, who sat at scattered tables. He proceeded quietly to the end of the saloon without looking at any of them so that he wouldn’t be obliged to acknowledge them. The lighting was weak, the tablecloth worn and dirty, and the place had an unpleasant smell of damp. The aged Nubian waiter with wrecked teeth smiled politely. The lupine seeds and Pepsi softened the harsh taste of the first, second, and third double brandy, and he was overcome by astonishment. He was possessed by an astonishment that, while genuine, was unlike that ephemeral sensation that he experienced every day. It was, rather, that same feeling of incomprehension that he’d known before only once, when he saw death for the first time. Then, it was his father who was laid out on the bed, covered to the chest with a white sheet, his mouth fastened shut, his eyes closed, and looking as ordinary as though he were sleeping, the only difference being a very slight moroseness of expression, one that was certain to escape notice at first sight and might not even be noticed at all, but which was death itself. He had had the same sensation then as he had now, a feeling that he didn’t understand, that he was sad, that suddenly and for no good reason he had been defeated, that his defeat was oppressive, cruel, and final, and that, when the glass shatters, the breaking fragments make a loud noise, then scatter once and for all and are no more.

3

He was waiting for her in the cold morning, standing next to the gas station with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat to keep himself warm, staring at the end of the street, where she would appear. She always came late, laughing and apologizing, her short hair bobbing with every step she took. Did anyone else know the reason for that lock of hair, the little one that hung down over her forehead to hide a scar left from an old injury? When they were first married, they had spent days in a cheap boarding house in Alexandria, and she had said to him on the way back, “If our friends ask, we’ll say we stayed at the Palestine.” He had laughed and answered that rich people didn’t visit Alexandria when it was cold like this because they had Luxor and Aswan to go to.

4

Those little black intertwined letters had eyes! Real eyes that stared and came alive with joy or clouded over with sorrow and that were now gazing out, hesitantly, anxiously, and with something that swung, with equal force, between mockery and pity.

“My darling Nahid,

“The twentieth of May! Do you remember? My darling, I….”

He couldn’t remember now how he’d climbed the stairs or how he got to his apartment, but he remembered clearly finding the lights on in the main room and seeing on the table the dinner she’d made for him and covered with a piece of newspaper (containing the sports section). Then he had gone to the bedroom, opened the door quietly, and turned on the light. She was sleeping and the little boy had curled up snuggled close to her, sticking his head between her arms. He stretched out his hand and shook her, and she woke and smiled when she saw him. He gestured to her to get up, so she did so and followed him outside, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake the child. Then she sat down on the couch in the main room. She was wearing the pink nightdress with the long sleeves and asked him, in a normal tone of voice, though she still hadn’t woken up completely, “How are you?”

He said nothing, turned his back, and walked slowly away until he was close to the door of the apartment. Then he came back similarly slowly and said suddenly, looking at the floor, “Nahid, we have to get a divorce.”

She looked at him and saw everything in his eyes. Her gaze was fixed and doubtful and a moment went by. Then she said in a steady voice (as though what he had said was something quite ordinary and familiar and