The Automobile Club of Egypt

27

When Mahmud got home, he seemed a little out of sorts. He greeted his mother and kissed her hand.

“Should I get your dinner?” she asked him.

“Thanks, but I’ve already eaten with some friends. Good night.”

As he walked down the hallway, he had the same feeling he had as a child when his father took him to the cinema for the first time. A feeling of sheer astonishment at a dazzling world full of animation and color that he had never even imagined. In the heavy silence of his bedroom, he undressed, put his pajamas on and threw himself on his bed, where he lay looking at the ceiling and thinking about how baffling it had all been. That was the last thing he would have expected. Good Lord. Had it really happened?

Madame Khashab, whom he now called Rosa, had been going about her business quite normally, in a motherly way. She had kissed him good-bye on his cheeks, as she had often done before, but suddenly she pressed herself against him and kissed him on the mouth. Mahmud was not completely devoid of experience, having kissed a fair number of girls in the gloom of Cinema al-Sharq, but the way Rosa kissed was different. She pressed her lips and tongue against his and lingered, sliding around in his arms and letting him feel the heat of her body. Then she shut the front door of the apartment with one hand as she pushed him inside. He tried to resist, but she started groping him, getting him more excited than he had ever been in his life. She had not given him the chance to say no. She pulled him into the bedroom, gently pushed him down onto the bed and started kissing him ravenously, stroking his arms and shoulders and massaging the thick thatch of hair on his chest.

“You’re so beautiful, Mahmud,” was all she could whisper, her breathing become shallow. “So beautiful.”

At some point, Mahmud’s vision had become blurry, and he could no longer make anything out. Rosa had led him along the tender paths of delight, swimming in deep waters familiar to her but which he was entering for the first time. She whispered instructions into his ear and apparently climaxed three times before he did. The two of them lay there naked, subsumed in the deep silence, that existential, visceral and postcoital mystery. Mahmud was like a man bewitched, unable to decide if it had all really happened. How had Madame Khashab gone from the decent lady whom he treated like his mother into a naked woman who could excite him as much as the women in the blue magazines he used to swap secretly with his school friends? He was also perplexed by the intensity of the sexual experience, which had been so searing and explosive, nothing at all like the frenetic orgasms he had while fumbling with girls in the gloom of the cinema. Rosa lay there next to him, and after a while she opened her blue eyes and seemed to be looking at him with pure gratitude. Her face was blushed as she whispered, “Can I hold you?”

“Yes.”

She slid her arms around him and laid her head on his chest. Mahmud looked down at her naked body and saw how raddled it was. Her neck was deeply lined, her heavy breasts sagged pendulously to the side and there were liver spots all over her flabby skin.

“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asked as if reading his mind and wanting reassurance.

“Of course.”

Rosa planted a kiss on his neck, smiled sadly and looked up at the ceiling.

“No, Mahmud. I used to be beautiful. I’m old now. You’re young, and you must know many prettier women.”

Mahmud said nothing but felt a little uneasy. He really wanted to leave, but suddenly Rosa became jolly again. She got out of bed, took his hand and said playfully, “Come on, let’s take a shower.”

“You go first.”

“No,” she said with a giggle. “Come with me. Let’s have a shower together.”

She pulled him into the bathroom, laughing, turned on the shower and started soaping him up, patting his muscles.

“My fantastic stud!”

Then she handed him a big pink sponge. “Mahmud, will you scrub my back?”

He had hardly started doing so before she whirled around, threw her arms around him and started insatiably kissing his stomach, working her way up to his chest and finally to his mouth, while her hand slithered around between his thighs. They fell onto the bed again, still dripping wet. This time Rosa went slowly. The first time she had gone at it hammer and tongs, but with her initial thirst quenched, she could now allow herself to luxuriate in total pleasure, as the two of them gave themselves over to a veritable tidal wave of lovemaking that left them both spent. Mahmud asked if he might take another shower before he got dressed. As he said good-bye at the door of her apartment, he felt that everything between them had changed. The way he felt when he embraced her, the timbre of her voice, even the perfume that earlier had seemed maternal — all of them now drove him mad with desire.

Mahmud lay on his bed thinking over what had happened with Rosa until he fell asleep. The following day, he went to the Club and worked as usual but could not banish the questions: Might he discover that what happened with Rosa had been a dream? Perhaps a hallucination?

If not, had Rosa fancied him from the start, or was she suddenly overcome with lust? She was over sixty, but at what age did a woman lose her libido? Was it only foreign women or did all women, whatever their age, desire men with such ardor? Did his mother have such feelings? Did her sedate and dignified appearance belie an incandescent desire for sex? He felt awkward to imagine his mother feeling passion, but then he told himself, “Of course my mother and father did what I did with Rosa; otherwise, how would my siblings and I have come into the world?”

Mahmud plunged headlong into this new reality. Rosa did her best to satisfy him in bed, teaching him so much about the technique of lovemaking that after a few weeks he became quite expert at it. They met so often that they developed their own rituals, which he loved. Rosa would start off by feeding him up. She served him various delicious meals, such as kebab and kufta from Abu Shaqra, chicken and brain sandwiches from the New Kursaal and fatta with calf’s foot from Hati el-Geysh. When he expressed his astonishment at how much she knew about Egyptian food, Rosa shook her head and laughed. Just like any good mother, she told him, “Mahmud, I’ve lived in Egypt longer than I lived in England.”

She taught him to drink wine. It tasted a little acrid at first, but then he felt the soothing sensation work its way into his brain. Time after time, his visits to Rosa followed the same routine: Mahmud would eat heartily, drink a whole bottle of wine and then go to the bathroom to brush his teeth and take a shower. He would come out wearing only the cashmere dressing gown Rosa had bought him. Then he would sit down next to her saying nothing, his legs crossed, as if he were waiting for the train. Rosa would sit there squirming a little, getting herself worked up and chatting away about nothing in particular. She would ask him about his family or grumble about how lazy and what a liar her doorman was, as if her relationship with Mahmud was nothing unusual or as if they were a married couple or a pair of lovers whose relationship was not simply sexual but extended into everyday life. Mahmud would sit there giving terse answers without looking at her. Suddenly, she would move closer to him, and he would feel her hot breath, or she might start stroking his curly hair or running her fingers along his broad lips. Mahmud would take his cue from that, and then the performance would start. He would enfold her in his strong arms, giving her no chance to resist. Then, like a toy he had played with long enough, he would carry her off to the bed. After kissing her for a long time and caressing her slowly, he would then run his hands all over her body until she relaxed and opened up to him, at which point he would make violent and merciless love to her. He seemed to be trying to hurt or punish her. Mahmud would pump away at Rosa like a machine, devoid of any false emotion or fake sentiment. He went at her with ever-increasing roughness, like a street brawler with Rosa his adversary. He would find her weak spots and then set at them as if there were no tomorrow, until she could do no more than lie there like a rag doll. Mahmud’s lovemaking, so rough and crude, drove Rosa wild. He seemed to have uncovered in her a land mine that had lain hidden for years under her polite and refined veneer. He took her back to a distant past, a primordial time when men and women did not disguise their animal lust but simply acted on it without shame or guilt, the way they might eat when they felt hungry. There was another reason why Mahmud was so good in bed: being slow-witted, he went about it slowly. He could lie there caressing Rosa for an age, forgetting time and space. Then, with the careless rhythm of a piston, he would make Rosa scream with wide-eyed delight as wave after wave of uncontrollable pleasure flowed through her. Rosa always had a few orgasms before Mahmud ejaculated. At that point, she would behave like a celebrant performing the rituals of a festival. With a happy and grateful look, she would kiss him on the face, neck, chest and hands as if he were a cat in his owner’s arms. Mahmud was such a fantastic lover that when Rosa thought back to all her previous lovers (including her late husband), she realized that she had never before experienced sexual pleasure such as Mahmud gave her.

His tumultuous nights with Rosa became such a fixture of his life that he could no longer imagine going without them. He lived for them the way a drug addict waits for his next fix. If a few days passed without a visit to Rosa, the absence of sexual relief beset him like a muscle cramp. She released all his pent-up sexual frustration, so he now slept soundly at night and no longer dreamt of sex. She gave him a life of ease: delicious food, fine wine and a soft bed. He felt some pride at bedding Rosa, for here he was, a dark-skinned Egyptian, expressing his manhood for the first time with an English lady who had become attached to him. His feelings toward her were strong and contradictory. One time when she was not feeling well, he visited her as she lay in bed every day for a week to check on her. There was no doubting that he loved her, although not in the usual sense of “love” between a man and a woman. By dint of their sexual exertions, he had managed to uncover the real Rosa, and he felt for her the sort of affection that one might feel for a work colleague, and when they were not having sex, he treated her with all due respect and enjoyed her company. Sometimes it even seemed to him that he was doing a sort of favor for a close friend, the way he might help someone tidy up or move some heavy furniture around. He did, so to speak, a bit of heavy lifting around the place to keep her happy and, once finished, would go and sit in his comfy chair. Occasionally, after they had finished lovemaking, he would feel a storm welling up inside him and an urge to get away. In those moments, Rosa was nothing more to him than a haggard old woman, pretending to be younger than her age, and he, young enough to be her son, was no more than a lad who had been seduced into fornication. With that, he felt a sudden resentment and wished he had never met her. Such sudden bouts of aversion might make him snap at her, but he would soon come back to himself and apologize, refusing to leave until he was certain that she had forgiven him. The waves of repulsion stemmed from his feelings of guilt. Mahmud had always been too lackadaisical and lazy to follow the strictures of his religion in an organized manner, except for going to say his Friday prayers, but sometimes his conscience would prick him.

“How will I be able to stand before God when I have been so sinful?”

One time when he was particularly encumbered with such feelings and wanted to get things off his chest, he went to see to his best friend, Fawzy (the only one to whom he ever told his innermost secrets). Aisha told him that Fawzy was up on the roof, and there Mahmud found him sitting in the dark, in a white galabiyya, rolling hashish cigarettes at a small table, of which Fawzy handed him one as he gestured at him to take a seat. Mahmud tried to refuse, but Fawzy pressed the cigarette on him. He lit it for him, and as it glowed, it started to give off the telltale aroma.

“Listen, mate,” he said, “hashish is a panacea. May God never let it dry up!”

Fawzy took a drag on the fat spliff and held it in, allowing it to have a strong effect. Then he coughed and looked at Mahmud with bloodshot eyes.

“What’s up, chump?”

They were sitting by the wall of the roof terrace with the hustle and bustle of Tram Street stretching out in front of them. Mahmud opened his mouth to say something, but his dark face suddenly grimaced.

“Fawzy!” he said, his voice quivering as if he were on the verge of tears. “I’m fornicating with Rosa. It’s a cardinal sin, and I’m afraid of God’s punishment.”

“You,” said Fawzy, pursing his lips and shaking his head, “are a complete idiot.”

“Why’s that?”

Fazwi placed his hand on Mahmud’s shoulder and then, as if explaining something to a child, said, “Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Rosa is an English lady who likes you and looks after you. Or would you rather run after those putrid girls and have to fork out a fortune on them?”

“It’s wrong, what I’m doing with Rosa.”

“So you’ve turned into a shaykh? And didn’t you kiss those girls too?”

“The sin of kissing is different from the sin of fornication. Uncle Darawi, the shaykh at the mosque, said in his sermon on Friday that fornication is one of the cardinal sins.”

Fawzy thought it over for a moment.

“All right, then,” he said. “Go and marry Rosa.”

“Marry someone my mother’s age?”

“Do a traditional oral marriage.”

Mahmud did not seem to understand. Fawzy heaved a sigh and explained gently, “In the old days, Mahmud, do you think they had officials and documents? No way. In the old days, people got married just by saying they were in front of two witnesses. No need for papers. So get married like they used to do way back then. I’ll go with you, and we’ll find as a third guy someone from the triangle. You just tell her, ‘I take you as my wife,’ and she tells you, ‘I take you as my husband,’ and we say, ‘We have witnessed the marriage.’ That way everything will be perfectly aboveboard.”

Mahmud shook his head. “I can’t do that,” he said decisively.

“So you don’t like the idea of fornicating, but you don’t like the idea of getting married either?”

“I’ve never heard of a marriage without papers or a contract. That would be a total sham.”

Fawzy took a deep drag on his spliff and, after another fit of coughing, continued, “All right. Forget it. Do you want to hear another idea?”

“Go on.”

“Listen up. Years ago, when the Muslims fought against Europe, didn’t the victorious army take the women of the defeated as concubines? After every war there would be concubines left on both sides, Muslim concubines for the Franks and Frankish concubines for the Muslims. We learned that in history at school, don’t you remember?”

“I was never any good at history.”

“Think, Mahmud. Had you lived in those days and been in a war and taken a woman from the enemy army, you would have been entitled to use her as a concubine and sleep with her without having to get married, and it would have been perfectly permissible according to our religion.”

“So what’s that got to do with me?”

“Just imagine that you lived five or six centuries ago and that you have waged war against the Franks, defeated them and taken Rosa as your concubine. It would be well within your rights to sleep with her.”

“First, I am alive today and not five hundred years ago. Second, I haven’t fought the Franks. And third, I don’t want any concubines, and even if I did, I would never take one who is sixty years old. What’s all this shit about concubines and Franks? You’re just stoned and spouting garbage.”

“Actually, I am stoned,” replied Fawzy calmly, rolling another spliff. “But I am speaking sense. Listen, Mahmud. However tormented you might feel, don’t leave Rosa. She has taken the bait, and now you have to reel her in and find the fortune.”

“You’re speaking in riddles.”

“It’s your brain that isn’t working.”

“Just leave me alone.”

Fawzy moved over to him. “I know what will make you happy again,” he told him as if imparting a dangerous secret. “And I’ll tell you, on condition that you do exactly what I say without further discussion.”