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

and he invited you to have a drink with him after dinner and like an old friend opened his heart to you, telling you that he worked in a hospital in Boston, while you told him about your diploma in commerce. When you calculated your salary for him in dollars, he couldn’t believe it at first and when you had convinced him, he laughed so long you couldn’t help yourself and you laughed too.

If it’s what the elevator operator at the hotel said to you, he is, when it comes down to it, nothing but a servant, and what do you, Sayed, care what servants say about you? And anyway, what happened in the room? The young man told you how attached he was to his mother and showed you her photo and when you told him she looked like your aunt, he said to you, laughing, that you must really be relatives then. He was slightly drunk but the alcohol only made him more agreeable. And when you asked him, Sayed, did he hesitate? Did he not hasten to stuff the hundred-dollar bill into your pocket? And after it was over—and, as you know well, Sayed, it isn’t always so—he wasn’t rude and insensitive, he remained tactful with you to the end. You have his address in Boston on you now and, who knows, maybe you’ll visit him there one day. And here you are now, Sayed, sitting and having breakfast at the Meridien, eating and drinking like a king, and all you have to do is to put the check on Room No. 511 and in half an hour the banks will be open and you’ll go to the nearest one, to any bank that will change the hundred dollars while you wait. So what’s the problem? Why, Sayed, are you all of a sudden crying now, like a child?

Games

ALL OF US IN FIFTH ELEMENTARY used to look forward to gym class with total impatience. On Tuesday mornings, we’d remove our school uniforms and put on our gym clothes—“white shorts, white undershirt, and tennis shoes.” Miss Souad, the gym teacher, would gather us in the playground and we’d stand in three parallel lines and do exercises for a quarter of an hour. Then we’d play ball for the rest of the period.

Our schoolmate Muhammad el-Dawakhli did not join us for gym because he was extremely fat. With his huge body, his flabby belly, and his large buttocks, he couldn’t get into the shorts like us or lie on his back and raise his legs in the air as we did in exercises. He couldn’t even play ball with us—he sweated too much and ran out of breath at the slightest effort. From this an essentially unspoken agreement developed by which Miss Souad ignored el-Dawakhli completely and he spent the gym period sitting on the steps that led up to the classrooms. There he would sit, wearing his school clothes of navy jacket and long gray pants, observing us in silence. We, on the other hand, no sooner had Miss Souad thrown us the inflatable ball with its black and white squares, would as one let out a loud cry of “Heeeeeey!” snatch up the ball, and plunge into a fierce discussion which would last until we had reached a suitable division into two teams. The shared goal would be marked out with two bricks and as soon as play started we would forget everything, running with the ball, dodging, scoring goals, and imitating the famous players we saw on television: the moment one of us scored a goal, his teammates would rush up to him and kiss him and congratulate him, while he’d fall to the ground and thank God for the goal or run off raising his hands toward the trees that lined either side of the playground, pretending that they were the stands, crammed with the roaring crowd.

At such moments, we would forget el-Dawakhli completely. We would think of him only if there was a dispute over some play, when we would turn to him in his distant seat and cry excitedly, “Was that a goal, Dawakhli?”

When this happened, el-Dawakhli would stand up, his plump face taking on a serious mien, hurry over to us, stretch out his arm in the direction of the play, and say, panting, “The ball came from here. So it’s a goal, a hundred percent.”

Having thus delivered himself of his conclusive decision and performed his duty, he’d return to the stands, sit down, and continue watching.

Now, when I think back, I realize how much el-Dawakhli must have longed to play with us and how much he must have wished he had a small, ordinary body like ours, instead of his comically fat one. But we were young, too young to understand. We thought of him as a huge, odd creature made to incite laughter and entertain, just like the elephants and bears that we went to the circus to see. Indeed, as far as we were concerned, making fun of el-Dawakhli was a temptation we could never resist. We were always insulting him for being so obese, to the extent even that some of the boys became veritable experts at getting a rise out of him. One might, for example, get up from his desk in the minutes between one class and the next with a stupid, quarrelsome expression on his face, rush over to where el-Dawakhli was sitting, and pounce on him—just like that, for no reason and without saying a word—giving him a hard slap on the back of his neck, and then running; or snatch a copy book or a pen from him; or—and this was the very least that duty demanded—stand at a safe distance in front of him and start making fun of him in a loud voice, saying, for example, “Hey, Dawakhli you bullock, what makes you so fat? What do they feed you at home, you mule, you pig?” and keep it up