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

paid them no attention, though, and continued watching, with schadenfreude, the faces of the defeated Egyptians. Their expressions were flat and broken and their features exuded sorrow and impotence. This is the way the Egyptians have really looked for thousands of years.

2

My mind was freed of delusions at one go, a fact of which I am proud, for I have known many men, some of them intelligent and well educated, who wasted their lives on phantasms—beliefs and theories the dupes spent years chasing like a mirage. Nationalism, religion, Marxism—all those dazzling words revealed their spuriousness to me at an early age. Getting rid of religion was easy. Marxism lasted longer. I acknowledge that Marxism has a rational side that deserves respect, and at the same time it leaves a mark on the soul that outlasts the idea itself. I remained a committed Marxist for two years, but I always felt I’d change. I couldn’t understand why I should make sacrifices for vulgar creatures like workers and peasants. I used to observe the common people exchanging their banal jokes. I’d watch them on their feast days when they surged onto the streets like over-excited beasts, treading everything beautiful under their blind heavy feet, and Marx’s grand words about them would shrivel before my contempt and hatred. Was I going to struggle and die for the likes of those? They were animals who deserved nothing but derision and to be ruled by terror; that was the only language they understood. Try just once for yourself being weak in front of one of them and see what he does to you.

With the passing of Marxism, I achieved full control over my mind and its liberation, and then I felt lonely. Delusions, much as they deceive you, also keep you company. The cold severe truth on the other hand casts you into a cruel wilderness. My success in taming my mind was directly paralleled by my failure to gain mastery over my feelings. The most complex mental problems pose no challenge to my thinking but any spontaneous simple interaction with people throws me into confusion and renders me powerless. There is a confirmed inverse relationship between awareness and action by which the people most apt to act are the most lethargic mentally and the dumbest, and vice versa. As awareness grows, so the ability to act is disturbed. My head—which never stops thinking and reviewing every single possibility and probability—this same head impedes my correct conduct in situations that most people consider quite ordinary and which they negotiate with complete ease. Before I go to visit a friend at his house for the first time, I am kept awake by the thought that the doorkeeper, whom I don’t know, will stop me and ask me which apartment I’m going to. Worrying over the doorkeeper’s question becomes such an obsession for me that I often insist to my friends that we meet in a public place rather than in their homes (without, of course, disclosing the reason to them), and when I’m forced in the end to face the moment when I have to cross the lobby of an apartment block in which my friend lives, I’m as ill at ease as a child, and I whistle, or look at the watch on my wrist, or fiddle with my shirt sleeve, to show that I am not concerned. On such occasions, the doorkeeper’s call quickly reaches me, for I will have passed him by, ignoring his enquiry and hurrying on without paying him any attention; but he will rush after me, catch up with me, and finally stop and question me; and, despite that fact that I am expecting the question, I feel each time an immense sense of affront at everything that has happened. When I respond, I sometimes do so roughly and harshly and at other times I am totally demolished before him, stammering and producing my words falteringly and agitatedly; and then the doorkeeper draws himself to his full height, his voice rises, and he stares in my face with wide-open, powerful eyes, for he has sensed my weakness. What I am never capable of in such circumstances is to give the impression of being a self-confident gentleman sure of his capabilities, of answering the doorkeeper in a calm voice and with a smile, and saying, “I’m going to see So-and-so Bey.” If I were to answer such a person just once in this fashion, he would back off immediately and be reduced right away to his natural size. This is the poise that I lack and I am incapable of determining if my unbalanced feelings are attributable to my overly developed awareness or to the circumstances of my upbringing. My memories of boyhood and adolescence are imprinted on my mind in a somewhat ‘historical’ way. When I review the events of my life, I feel as though I were a tragic hero accepting the blows of fate with a noble, courageous heart. Heroes, unlike common people, do not meet with ephemeral, ordinary events: everything that happens to them is, of necessity, significant and fateful. Similarly, events are not imprinted on my memory as separate, scattered flashes but as a continuous line of points that are joined in a way that can neither be predicted nor prepared for. I imagine it as being in the form of a cardboard box divided up by partitions into small, intersecting passageways.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

This is what the box looks like from above (fig. 1). A small wooden doll whose movements are controlled by numerous strings (fig. 2) passes through the labyrinthine passageways of the box; the strings are so thin they can barely be seen, but they are too strong to be cut and they are gathered in a single large hand, outside the box. This hand controls the doll’s movements and the owner of the hand sees the box in its entirety, with all its passageways