The Automobile Club of Egypt

KAMEL

We are all responsible for what happened to Saleha. Said presented her with Abd el-Barr and nagged her until she married him. My mother and I failed in our duty to protect her. Saleha trusts our opinion, and had I stuck to my objection to the marriage, that would have been the end of the matter. Why did she suddenly agree to it? Maybe her acquiescence irritated me so much that I simply gave up. Maybe my job, studies and work for the organization had used up all my energy. It now fell to me to get her a divorce. I could hardly believe Said’s selfishness, handing his sister over to an impotent drug addict just to get his contract signed. I had made up my mind to go and see Abd el-Barr that Wednesday, my day off, but in the end I could not wait that long. So the following day, when I finished my shift in the storeroom, I made my way to his office in Tawfiqiya Square. He was taken aback to see me but gave me a warm welcome. He looked at me as if he knew what was on my mind.

“What can I get you to drink?” he asked in a friendly manner.

“Nothing, thanks.”

He made a gesture to his office boy to fetch some tea. I did not object. I did not want to waste my anger on trifles.

“Was it difficult to find my office?” he said, smiling.

“No. Everyone knows this street.”

“I have been renting this office for the last ten years. It has the advantage of being large and quite comfortable. The other tenants in the building are decent, and it is downtown. Very easy to find.”

I made no comment.

“I would never be to able to find anything like it for such a low rent,” he carried on. “Guess how much I pay per month!”

“Abd el-Barr. Let us not ignore the reason for this visit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know.”

“If you’re talking about the matter with Saleha,” he smiled, “let’s not talk here. I have a few things to do, but if you can wait half an hour, I’ll invite you to lunch, and we can speak more freely.”

Realizing he was trying to avoid a scene, I raised my voice, “We need to talk now.”

The office boy put a glass of tea down in front of me and went out. Abd el-Barr came over and sat in the armchair opposite me.

“And just what do you want, Kamel?” he asked in an aggressive whisper.

“I want you to divorce Saleha.”

“You do know that she ran away from our home?”

“She ran away because you were beating her.”

“I hit her because she was behaving outrageously.”

“If anyone raises a hand against my sister, he has me to answer to.”

His eyes almost popped out of his head. He looked like he was about to say something but just sat there looking at the ground, and then he lit a cigarette, and I noticed his hand shaking.

“Listen, Abd el-Barr,” I said quietly. “Just as we entered into all of this in a decent way, let’s end it decently.”

“It was your brother who arranged this, not you.”

“It’s Saleha who is asking for a divorce.”

“So in your family, it’s women, not men, who make the decisions?”

“We all speak up for ourselves.”

“And what if I don’t want a divorce?”

“You’d be happy living with a woman who doesn’t want to be with you?”

“If we were to listen to every hysterical woman, there’d be no families left in all of Egypt. Women don’t make good decisions. They’re fickle.”

“My sister, Saleha, is better educated than you.”

I said that just to provoke him. He was breathing heavily and trying to control himself.

“That’s enough, Kamel,” he said quietly. “Let’s not talk any more now. Wait until you have calmed down.”

I got up and walked over to him.

“You have to divorce Saleha immediately,” I shouted.

“Lower your voice.”

“I’ll speak however I like.”

“Seems you lack manners, just like your sister.”

“If anyone needs to learn manners, it’s you.”

He jumped to his feet, let out a shout and threw a punch, but I ducked it, grabbing his arm and twisting it behind his back, and yelled, “I’ll rip off the arm you used to hit my sister!”

At this point, the office staff rushed in to separate us.

“I’ll ruin your name!” I bellowed. “You low-down drug addict!”

He responded with a stream of invective, but he seemed shaken.

Seeing my accusations had hit a nerve, I started shouting at him again, “You should have got over your drug habit before marrying a woman from a decent family!”

The staff started trying to counter my accusation, but their protests were not terribly convincing. It seemed they knew the truth. As they hustled me out of the office, they took their time, as if to give me a chance to carry on insulting him.

“I’ll give you one week,” I shouted. “If you don’t divorce Saleha, I’m going to report you to the police for using drugs.”

I stumbled out onto the street. I was overwrought, but at the same time I felt happy about having shown up Abd el-Barr in front of his employees. I had managed to get back at him for humiliating my sister. I reached Soliman Pasha Street and walked down the Estoril passage to get to the Automobile Club. I started my shift in the storeroom with my mind completely distracted. Comanus noticed, but when he asked me what the matter was, I told him I was exhausted from my studies.

I finished my shift in the evening, and when I arrived home, I saw Saleha. The bruises on her face had turned blue. She put her arms around me and clung to me as she used to do when she was a child.

“Come to my bedroom,” I told her. “I have a few things to tell you.”

“Stay here and talk,” my mother said, getting up. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

I sat next to Saleha.

“I want you to look on all of this,” I told her, “as just a bad experience that you’ll forget.”

“What if Abd el-Barr won’t divorce me?”

“He’ll divorce you, whether he wants to or not.”

“Have you seen him?”

I nodded, and she asked me anxiously, “What did he say to you?”

“Don’t worry yourself about it. We got you into this mess, and we’ll get you out of it. As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is for you to go back to school.”

“I can’t. I can’t face my school friends now that I have failed in my marriage.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. It happens to lots of girls.”

Saleha looked straight ahead as if mulling it over, and then she burst into tears. I kissed her head and tried to soothe her. A little while later, the three of us sat down to dinner. I tried to distract Saleha with a few funny anecdotes. That night when I went to my bedroom, I tried to study but could not. I lay down fully clothed and smoked a cigarette. I thought of my father and how much I missed him. How much he had put up with for our sake. Now that I was shouldering the burden, it seemed like catastrophes were occurring in swift succession. “May God have mercy upon your soul, Father!” I thought. “You kept all your troubles from us. You never complained.” Then I got up, did my ablutions, said the fatiha for my father’s soul and prostrated myself on the ground for longer than necessary. I prayed to God to have mercy upon him and to let him enter paradise. When I went to bed, I felt better. Prayer afforded me a real sense of calm. It made me wish that I prayed more regularly, but I was always getting distracted or giving in to laziness. I felt guilty at my religious laxity, even though I thought that it was not God who needed our prayers, but we were the ones who needed to pray in order to become better people. I believed in God’s justice and mercy. I believed that he would forgive us our religious shortcomings. I was going to try hard to be useful and to work in order to support my family, as well as study and do my duty for my country.

Once I made these resolutions, I felt better and found the will to get out of bed and continue studying. I had been asked to translate an article about Egypt from The Times and give it to Hasan Mu’min the next day. It took me about two hours. The author had written at great length about the king’s depraved behavior and his nocturnal antics. I made myself a glass of mint tea and sat down; it was three in the morning before I went to bed. I was so preoccupied with Saleha’s misfortunes that I almost forgot about the mission that the prince had tasked me with.

The next morning, I arrived at the Club before ten o’clock. I had hidden the glass orb in my briefcase, which usually carried my textbooks. The staff were at that moment cleaning the building from top to bottom. I looked behind me to make sure that no one could see me. Instead of making my way to the storeroom, I went up the stairs into the casino and locked the door behind me. I knew that I had only a few minutes. The room was gloomy and reeked of smoke from the night before. I found the wooden stepladder leaning against the wall just as the prince had described. I picked it up and was dismayed to find it so heavy, as I could not just drag it along the floor in case it made a noise. With great difficulty, I carried it to the middle of the room and positioned it gently underneath the chandelier. I gingerly climbed up a few steps until my shoulders were level with the crystals. There was a small metal rung in the chandelier into which the glass orb fitted perfectly. I checked to see that it was firmly fixed in place before climbing back down. Suddenly, I heard shouting outside. It was part of the plan for Abdoun to pick a fight with one of the staff on the roof in order to divert their attention. I put the stepladder back where I found it, opened the door cautiously and slipped out undetected, tiptoeing down the stairs. By the time I reached the entrance hall, I was certain that my mission had been successful. Suddenly, I saw Labib the telephone operator standing in front of me.

“All hell’s broken loose on the roof,” I spluttered, trying to act natural. “I want to go up and see what’s happening, but if I do, Monsieur Comanus might turn up and find the storeroom still locked.”

“Don’t worry,” Labib said. “Go and open up. I’ll go and see what it’s all about.”

“Let me know that they’re all all right, Uncle Labib. I don’t want to sit downstairs worrying.”

I opened the storeroom door and turned on the light. Then I lit a cigarette. After the first drag, I told myself, “You’ve done it, lad!” I found the danger strangely exciting. I was still proud of myself for having distributed the pamphlets in Sayyida Zeinab and fooling the English soldiers. This time, I had carried out my mission even with so much on my mind, lacking sleep and distraught over Saleha. Thank God, I hadn’t slipped up and given myself away. I made a pot of Turkish coffee and smoked another cigarette. Then Comanus turned up, and I greeted him, asking him what he wanted me to do. I thought it best to behave naturally because at some point they could question Comanus if they discovered the orb. I lugged a few things to the restaurant and then asked permission to sit and study.

After a while, Comanus came and sat down next to me. He had a warm smile on his face. “How are you getting on with your studies, Kamel?” he asked.

“Thank God, I’m doing fine. And how are you, sir?”

Comanus took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handkerchief as he always did when feeling pensive. Then he put them back on and said, “By God, I have to say, Kamel, that things at the Club have been a little odd lately.”

“What is it?”

“I’m worried about the staff. They’ve been to see Alku, and they asked him to end the beatings he gives them.”

“They’re right.”

“I know that it’s a sensitive subject for you because of your father, Hagg Abd el-Aziz, may God have mercy on him.”

“Not just because he was my father; it’s inhuman to have someone beaten.”

“But it surprises me. The staff have put up with it for twenty years. What suddenly made them object?”

“Everyone has his limits.”

“But the strangest thing is that Alku has agreed.”

“Well, that sounds all right to me.”

Comanus said nothing for a few moments. Then he gave me a worried look and said, “You don’t know Alku. He’s evil and unpredictable. There’s no way that he has suddenly turned into a kind person. God help us. I think that the Automobile Club has got some dark days ahead of it.”