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

For the first time since she was a child, he’d wanted to do her hair for her. He stuttered in embarrassment when he asked her, and she laughed and yielded her head to him. She could still remember how he took so long making it look nice that in the end she was compelled, laughing, to do it all over again, while he mumbled an apology. “Goodbye, Professor,” he’d said to her in farewell. She turned her back to bring an end to the moment of emotion.

Her father had never gone to university. Poverty had forced him to work from an early age, and he had dreamed for so long of her being awarded her undergraduate degree that it was no surprise when he died a few months before she did so.

A cold gust of air from the outside chilled her. She put out her hand and closed the window tightly. She threw her head back and her dress rustled, reminding her of its owner, a neighbor of hers who loved news and gossip. She started to analyze her feelings at that moment. What did the job mean to her? “One hundred and twenty pounds a month,” came back the vehement answer, which was seconded by a quantity of worn-out underwear, socks with holes in them, and an uncountable number of shoes with patched soles. In the same answer, her mother’s heartfelt dawn prayers mingled with the heartbroken sobs to which her youngest sister yielded after her first encounter with the sort of men found on public buses. All the money meant to her was to be able to satisfy the needs of those two. She was the only emissary they could dispatch to bring it back. For herself, inside, she cared nothing for banknotes.

One day a girlfriend of hers had told her with genuine sorrow, “Reading has spoiled you.” She had laughed then at this odd perspective, even though sometimes it seemed to her that it wasn’t so stupid. It wasn’t that literature had spoiled her but that it had spoiled the taste of other things for her. It would have been a real pleasure to yearn, like all the other girls, for a villa and a luxury car driven by a colossal husband. There could be no doubt that the speed of the food processor and the whirr of air conditioning bestowed a sort of happiness and that literature had deprived her of that. Inside, she was alone. Alone. One day, on seeing a country wedding procession, she’d almost vomited. Sex was everywhere, from the hashish smoked by the men to the nods and winks of the women, the softness of the thighs, and the eight-year-old girl who started writhing voluptuously when her mother lovingly tied a sash around her hips. Joy was a wild beast with vulgar features, an implacable urge lurking within everyone and everything in creation. Sorrow, however, was transparent and noble as the night. She loved it like winter. It elevated her and lifted her toward itself, and when Beethoven’s Ninth surged forward, she would close her eyes and wait for it, and it would come to her as something immortal, like sweet streams purling toward her among the rocks of ignorance and cruelty.

She came to herself to hear the driver saying, “Here’s Number 6.” A three-story residence of recent date, as evidenced by the piles of sand and stacks of red bricks. Her self-confidence was too feeble to support her at a moment like this but a delicious inner prompting assured her she would get the job, and that she was, simply, very good at French.

“Apartment 15,” the doorman told her in a monotone, turning his face away. No doubt there had been lots of girls before her. In the lobby, she found herself face to face with a marble statue of Venus. It was life size. She went up to it. She gazed, her eyes roaming over its noble features, caressing the goddess with the longing of one who had discovered, grown to know, and loved. Even as she was drawn ineluctably toward its splendor, however, she became aware of an uncomfortable feeling that vitiated the beauty. The sacred face seemed strange to her. There was, in the silence of the gods, something with which she was unfamiliar. It seemed to her that there was a certain pinchedness about the goddess’s lips—a deep, mysterious, private expression. It was a pain of which gods of smaller size were incapable.

The apartment number was engraved in Roman numerals and a small plaque had been nailed to the wooden door announcing, with all the humility of confidence, “Muhammad Musilhi, Engineer.” Your Excellency Muhammad Bey, ten years have I sailed literature’s seas and I know French well. My mother, for her part, has been ground down standing in the lines of the poor.

She pressed the musical bell. A few moments later and the door opened and, rather than a Nubian servant, a blonde lady appeared, her beauty hinting at a European origin, which was confirmed by her accent when she spoke.

“You’ve come about the advertisement? Please come this way. I am Madame Musilhi.”

With him sat four or five girls, also applicants no doubt. Their features were indistinguishable from one another, the only thing she could make out being the poverty that leered shamelessly from their faces. He, naturally, dominated the gathering, even though he was sitting on the extreme right. He was stout without being excessively so, or, one might say, his body had sufficient fullness to guarantee that he would be addressed by the title “Bey” never had it occurred to anyone to hail Musilhi Bey by his name alone, or even accompanied by any other than this, his preferred, title—as though someone were to say to him, “Mr. Musilhi” or “Engineer Musilhi.” No one would dare to do that, neither colleague nor stranger.

In reality, this phenomenon was not so much related to his stoutness or to the smartness of his clothes, or