The Yacoubian Building

1

The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street. Clothing- and shoe-store owners, their employees (of both sexes), waiters, cinema staff, habitués of the Brazilian Coffee Stores, even doorkeepers, shoeshine men, beggars, and traffic cops — Zaki Bey knows them all by name and exchanges greetings and news with them. Zaki Bey is one of the oldest residents of Suleiman Basha Street, to which he came in the late 1940s after his return from his studies in France and which he has never thereafter left. To the residents of the street he cuts a well-loved, folkloric figure when he appears before them in his three-piece suit (winter and summer, its bagginess hiding his tiny, emaciated body); with his carefully ironed handkerchief always dangling from his jacket pocket and always of the same color as his tie; with his celebrated cigar, which, in his glory days, was Cuban deluxe but is now of the foul-smelling, tightly packed, low-quality local kind; and with his old, wrinkled face, his thick glasses, his gleaming false teeth, and his dyed black hair, whose few locks are arranged in rows from the leftmost to the right-most side of his head in the hope of covering the broad, naked, bald patch. In brief, Zaki Bey el Dessouki is something of a legend, which makes his presence both much looked for and completely unreal, as though he might disappear at any moment, or as though he were an actor playing a part, of whom it is understood that once done he will take off his costume and put his original clothes back on. If we add to the above his jolly temperament, his unceasing stream of scabrous jokes, and his amazing ability to engage in conversation anyone he meets as though he were an old friend, we will understand the secret of the warm welcome with which everyone on the street greets him. Indeed Zaki Bey has only to appear at the top end of the street at around ten in the morning for the salutations to ring out from every side, and often a number of his disciples among the young men who work in the stores will rush up to him to ask him jokingly about certain sexual matters that remain obscure to them, in which case Zaki Bey will draw on his vast and encyclopedic knowledge of the subject to explain to the youths — in great detail, with the utmost pleasure, and in a voice audible to all — the most subtle sexual secrets. Sometimes, in fact, he will ask for a pen and paper (provided in the twinkling of an eye) so that he can draw clearly for the young men some curious coital position that he himself tried in the days of his youth.

Some important information on Zaki Bey el Dessouki should be provided. He is the youngest son of Abd el Aal Basha el Dessouki, the well-known pillar of the Wafd who was prime minister on more than one occasion and was one of the richest men before the Revolution, he and his family owning more than five thousand feddans of prime agricultural land.

Zaki Bey studied engineering in Paris. It had been expected, of course, that he would play a leading political role in Egypt using his father’s influence and wealth, but suddenly the Revolution erupted and everything changed. Abd el Aal Basha was arrested and brought before the revolutionary tribunal and, though the charge of political corruption failed to stick, he remained in detention for a while and most of his possessions were confiscated and distributed among the peasants under the land reform. Under the impact of all this the Basha soon died, the father’s misfortune leaving its mark also on the son. The engineering office that he opened in the Yacoubian Building quickly failed and was transformed with time into the place where Zaki Bey spends his free time each day reading the newspapers, drinking coffee, meeting friends and lovers, or sitting for hours on the balcony contemplating the passersby and traffic on Suleiman Basha.

It must be said, however, that the failure that Engineer Zaki el Dessouki has met with in his professional life should not be attributed entirely to the Revolution; it stems rather, at base, from the feebleness of his ambition and his obsession with sensual pleasure. Indeed his life, which has lasted sixty-five years so far, revolves with all its comings and goings, both happy and painful almost entirely around one word — women. He is one of those who fall completely and hopelessly into the sweet clutches of captivity of the female and for whom women are not a lust that flares up and, once satisfied, is extinguished, but an entire world of fascination that constantly renews itself in images of infinitely alluring diversity — the firm, voluptuous bosoms with swelling nipples like delicious grapes; the backsides, pliable and soft, quivering as though in anticipation of his violent assault from behind; the painted lips that drink kisses and moan with pleasure; the hair in all its manifestations (long, straight, and demure, or long and wild with disordered tresses, or medium-length, domestic and well-settled, or that short hair a la garcon that evokes unfamiliar, boyish kinds of sex). And the eyes… ah, how lovely are the looks from those eyes — honest or dissimulating and duplicitous; bold or demure; even furious, reproachful, and filled with loathing!

So much and even more did Zaki Bey love women. He had known every kind, starting with Lady Kamla, daughter of the former king’s maternal uncle, with whom he learned the etiquette and rites of the royal bed chambers — the candles that burn all night, the glasses of French wine that kindle the flames of desire and obliterate fear, the hot bath before the assignation, when the body is anointed with creams and perfumes. From Lady Kamla (she of the inexorable appetite) he learned how to start and when to desist and how to ask for the most abandoned sexual positions in extremely refined French. Zaki Bey has also slept with women of all classes — oriental dancers, foreigners, society ladies and the wives of the eminent and distinguished, university and secondary school students, even fallen women, peasant women, and housemaids. Every one had her special flavor, and he would often laughingly compare the bedding of Lady Kamla with its rules of protocol and that of that beggar woman he picked up one night when drunk in his Buick and took back to his apartment in Baehler Passage, and whom he discovered, when he went into the bathroom with her to wash her body himself, to be so poor that she made her underwear out of empty cement sacks. He can still remember, with a mixture of tenderness and distress, the woman’s embarrassment as she took off her bloomers, on which was written in large letters “Portland Cement — Tura.” He remembers too that she was one of the most beautiful of all the women he has known and one of the most ardent in love.

All these varied and teeming experiences have made of Zaki el Dessouki a true expert on women, and in “the science of women,” as he calls it, he has strange and eccentric theories that, whether one accepts or rejects them, definitely deserve consideration. Thus he believes, for example, that the outstandingly lovely woman is usually a cold lover in bed, while women of middling beauty or even of a certain degree of ugliness are always more passionate because they are truly in need of love and will make every effort in their power to please their lovers. Zaki Bey also believes that how a woman pronounces the letter “s” — specifically — is a clue as to how ardent she will be when making love. Thus, if a woman says a word such as “Susu” or “basbusa,” for example, in a tremulous, arousing way, he concludes immediately that she is gifted in bed, and that the opposite will also be true. Zaki Bey also believes that every woman on the face of the earth is surrounded by a sort of ethereal field inhabited by vibrations that though invisible and inaudible can nevertheless be vaguely felt, and that one who has trained himself to read these vibrations can divine the degree to which that woman is sexually satisfied. Thus no matter how respectable and modest the woman, Zaki Bey is able to sense her sexual hunger from the trembling of her voice or her nervous, affectedly exaggerated laugh, or even from the warmth radiated by her hand when he shakes it. As for the women who are possessed by a satanic lust that they can never quench (“ les filles de joie,” as Zaki Bey calls them) — those mysterious women who feel that they truly exist only when in bed and making love and who place no other pleasure in life on the same footing as sex, those unhappy beings fated by virtue of their excessive thirst for pleasure to meet with a terrifying and unavoidable fate — those women, Zaki el Dessouki asserts, are all the same, even though their faces may vary. He will invite any who doubt this fact to inspect the pictures published in the newspapers of women sentenced to be executed for participating with their lovers in the murder of their husbands, saying, “We shall discover — with a little observation — that they all have the same countenance: the lips generally full, sensual, relaxed, and not pressed together; the features thick and libidinous; and the look bright and empty, like that of a hungry animal.”

It was Sunday. The stores on Suleiman Basha closed their doors, and the bars and cinemas were full of customers. With its locked stores and old-fashioned, European-style buildings the street seemed dark and empty, as though it were in a sad, romantic, European film. At the start of the day, Shazli, the old doorman, moved his seat from next to the elevator to the sidewalk in front of the Yacoubian Building to watch the people going in and out on their day off.

Zaki el Dessouki got to his office a little before noon and from the first instant Abaskharon, the office servant, took in the situation. After twenty years of working for Zaki Bey, Abaskharon had learned to understand his moods at a single glance, knowing full well what it meant when his master arrived at the office excessively elegantly dressed, the scent of the expensive perfume that he kept for special occasions preceding him, and appeared tense and nervous, standing up, sitting down, walking irritably about, never settling to anything, and hiding his impatience in brusqueness and gruffness — it meant that the Bey was expecting his first meeting with a new girlfriend. As a result Abaskharon didn’t get angry when the Bey started berating him for no reason, but shook his head as one who understands how things stand, quickly finished sweeping the reception room, and then grabbed his wooden crutches and pounded vigorously and rapidly off down the long tiled corridor to the large room where the Bey was sitting. In a voice that experience had taught him to make completely neutral, he said, “Do you have a meeting, Excellency? Should I get everything ready, Excellency?”

The Bey looked in his direction and contemplated him for an instant as though making up his mind as to the proper tone of voice to use in reply. He looked at Abaskharon’s striped flannel gallabiya, torn in numerous places, at his crutches and his amputated leg, at his aged face and the grizzled stubble on his chin, at his cunning, narrow eyes and the familiar unctuous, scared smile that never left him, and said, “Get everything ready for a meeting, quickly.”

Thus spoke the Bey in brusque tones as he went out onto the balcony. In their common dictionary, “a meeting” meant the Bey’s spending time alone with a woman in the office, and “everything” referred to certain rites that Abaskharon performed for his master just before the love-making, starting with an injection of imported Tri-B vitamin supplement that he administered to him in the buttock and that hurt him so much each time that he would moan out loud and pour curses on “that ass” Abaskharon for his heavy, brutish touch. This would be followed by a cup of sugarless coffee made of beans spiced with nutmeg that the bey would imbibe slowly while dissolving beneath his tongue a small piece of opium. The rites concluded with the placing of a large plate of salad in the middle of the table next to a bottle of Black Label whisky, two empty glasses, and a metal champagne bucket filled to the brim with ice cubes.

Abaskharon quickly set about getting everything ready while Zaki Bey took a seat on the balcony overlooking Suleiman Basha, lit a cigar, and settled down to watch the passersby. His feelings swung between bounding impatience for the beautiful meeting and promptings of anxiety that his sweetheart Rabab would fail to turn up for the appointment, in which case he would have wasted the entire month of effort that he had expended in pursuit of her. He had been obsessed with her since he first saw her at the Cairo Bar in Tawfikiya Square where she worked as a hostess. She had bewitched him completely and day after day he had gone back to the bar to see her. Describing her to an aged friend, he had said, “She represents the beauty of the common people in all its vulgarity and provocativeness. She looks as though she had just stepped out of one of those paintings by Mahmoud Said.” Zaki Bey then expatiated on this to make his meaning clearer to his friend, saying, “Do you remember that maid at home who used to beguile your dreams when you were an adolescent? And of whom it was your dearest wish that you might stick yourself to her soft behind, then grab her tender-skinned breasts with your hands as she washed the dishes at the kitchen sink? And that she would bend over in a way that made you stick to her even more closely and whisper in provocative refusal, before giving herself to you, ‘Sir… It’s wrong, sir…?’ In Rabab I have stumbled onto just such a treasure.”

However, stumbling onto a treasure does not necessarily mean possessing it and, for the sake of his beloved Rabab, Zaki Bey had been compelled to put up with numerous annoyances, like having to spend whole nights in a dirty, cramped, badly lit and poorly ventilated place like the Cairo Bar. He had been almost suffocated by the crowds and the thick cigarette smoke and had come close to being deafened by the racket of the sound system that never even for an instant stopped emitting disgusting, vulgar songs. And that was to say nothing of the foul-mouthed arguments and fistfights among the patrons of the establishment, who were a mixture of skilled laborers, bad types, and foreigners, or of the glasses of foul, stomach-burning brandy that he was forced to toss down every night and the exorbitant mistakes in the checks to which he turned a blind eye, even leaving a big tip for the house plus another even bigger one that he would thrust into the cleavage of Rabab’s dress, feeling, as soon as his fingers touched her full, swaying breasts, the hot blood surging in his veins and a violence of desire that almost hurt him it was so powerful and insistent.

Zaki Bey had put up with all of this for the sake of Rabab, inviting her again and again to meet him outside the bar. She would refuse coquettishly and he would repeat his invitation, never losing hope, and then just yesterday she had agreed to visit him at the office. So overjoyed had he been that he had thrust a fifty-pound note into her dress without the slightest feeling of regret, and she had come up to him so close that he had felt her hot breath on his face and, biting her lower lip with her teeth, she had whispered in a provocative voice that demolished what equanimity he had left, “Tomorrow, I’ll pay you back, sir… for everything you’ve done for me. ”

Zaki Bey bore the painful Tri-B injection, dissolved the opium, and started slowly drinking the first glass of whisky, followed by a second and a third, which soon released him from his tension. Good humor enveloped him and pleasant musings started gently caressing his head like soft tunes. Rabab’s appointment was for one o’clock, and by the time the wall clock struck two, Zaki Bey had almost lost hope, when suddenly he heard the sound of Abaskharon’s crutches striking the hallway tiles, followed immediately by his face appearing around the door as he said, his voice panting with excitement as though the news genuinely made him happy, “Madame Rabab has arrived, Excellency.”

In 1934, Hagop Yacoubian, the millionaire and then doyen of the Armenian community in Egypt, decided to construct an apartment block that would bear his name. He chose for it the best site on Suleiman Basha and engaged a well-known Italian engineering firm to build it, and the firm came up with a beautiful design — ten lofty stories in the high classical European style, the balconies decorated with Greek faces carved in stone, the columns, steps, and corridors all of natural marble, and the latest model of elevator by Schindler. Construction continued for two whole years, at the end of which there emerged an architectural gem that so exceeded expectations that its owner requested of the Italian architect that he inscribe his name, Yacoubian, on the inside of the doorway in large Latin characters that were lit up at night in neon, as though to immortalize his name and emphasize his ownership of the gorgeous building.

The cream of the society of those days took up residence in the Yacoubian Building — ministers, big land-owning bashas, foreign manufacturers, and two Jewish millionaires (one of them belonging to the famous Mosseri family). The ground floor of the building was divided equally between a spacious garage with numerous doors at the back where the residents’ cars (most of them luxury makes such as Rolls-Royce, Buick, and Chevrolet) were kept overnight and at the front a large store with three frontages that Yacoubian kept as a showroom for the silver products made in his factories. This showroom remained in business successfully for four decades, then little by little declined, until recently it was bought by Hagg Muhammad Azzam, who reopened it as a clothing store. On the broad roof two rooms with utilities were set aside for the doorkeeper and his family to live in, while on the other side of the roof fifty small rooms were constructed, one for each apartment in the building. Each of these rooms was no more than two meters by two meters in area and the walls and doors were all of solid iron and locked with padlocks whose keys were handed over to the owners of the apartments. These iron rooms had a variety of uses at that time, such as storing foodstuffs, overnight kenneling for dogs (if they were large or fierce), and laundering clothes, which in those days (before the spread of the electric washing machine) was undertaken by professional washerwomen who would do the wash in the room and hang it out on long lines that extended across the roof. The rooms were never used as places for the servants to sleep, perhaps because the residents of the building at that time were aristocrats and foreigners who could not conceive of the possibility of any human being sleeping in such a cramped place. Instead, they would set aside a room in their ample, luxurious apartments (which sometimes contained eight or ten rooms on two levels joined by an internal stairway) for the servants.

In 1952 the Revolution came and everything changed. The exodus of Jews and foreigners from Egypt started, and every apartment that was vacated by reason of the departure of its owners was taken over by an officer of the armed forces, who were the influential people of the time. By the 1960s, half the apartments were lived in by officers of various ranks, from first lieutenants and recently married captains all the way up to generals, who would move into the building with their large families. General El Dakrouri (at one point director of President Muhammad Naguib’s office) was even able to acquire two large apartments next door to one another on the tenth floor, one of which he used as a residence for himself and his family, the other as a private office where he would meet petitioners in the afternoon.

The officers’ wives began using the iron rooms in a different way: for the first time they were turned into places for the stewards, cooks, and young maids that they brought from their villages to serve their families to stay in. Some of the officers’ wives were of plebeian origin and could see nothing wrong in raising small animals (rabbits, ducks, and chickens) in the iron rooms, and the West Cairo District’s registers saw numerous complaints filed by the old residents to prevent the raising of such animals on the roof. Owing to the officers’ pull, however, these always got shelved, until the residents complained to General El Dakrouri, who, thanks to his influence with the former, was able to put a stop to this unsanitary phenomenon.

In the seventies came the “Open Door Policy” and the well-to-do started to leave the downtown area for El Mohandiseen and Medinet Nasr, some of them selling their apartments in the Yacoubian Building, others using them as offices and clinics for their recently graduated sons or renting them furnished to Arab tourists. The result was that the connection between the iron rooms and the building’s apartments was gradually severed, and the former stewards and servants ceded them for money to new, poor residents coming from the countryside or working somewhere downtown who needed a place to live that was close by and cheap.

This transfer of control was made easier by the death of the Armenian agent in charge of the building, Monsieur Grigor, who used to administer the property of the millionaire Hagop Yacoubian with the utmost honesty and accuracy, sending the proceeds in December of each year to Switzerland, where Yacoubian’s heirs had migrated after the Revolution. Grigor was succeeded as agent by Maitre Fikri Abd el Shaheed, the lawyer, who would do anything provided he was paid, taking, for example, one large percentage from the former occupant of the iron room and another from the new tenant for writing him a contract for the room.

The final outcome was the growth of a new community on the roof that was entirely independent of the rest of the building. Some of the newcomers rented two rooms next to one another and made a small residence out of them with all utilities (latrine and washroom), while others, the poorest, collaborated to create a shared latrine for every three or four rooms, the roof community thus coming to resemble any other popular community in Egypt. The children run around all over the roof barefoot and half naked and the women spend the day cooking, holding gossip sessions in the sun, and, frequently, quarreling, at which moments they will exchange the grossest insults as well as accusations touching on one another’s honor, only to make up soon after and behave with complete goodwill toward one another as though nothing has happened. Indeed, they will plant hot, lip-smacking kisses on each other’s cheeks and even weep from excess of sentiment and affection.

The men pay little attention to the women’s quarrels, viewing them as just one more indication of that defectiveness of mind of which the Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — spoke. These men of the roof pass their days in a bitter and wearisome struggle to earn a living and return at the end of the day exhausted and in a hurry to partake of their small pleasures — tasty hot food and a few pipes of tobacco (or of hashish if they have the money), which they either smoke in a water-pipe on their own or stay up to smoke while talking with the others on the roof on summer nights. The third pleasure is sex, in which the people of the roof revel and which they see nothing wrong with discussing frankly so long as it is of a sort sanctioned by religion. Here there is a contradiction. Any of the men of the roof would be ashamed, like most lower-class people, to mention his wife by name in front of the others, referring to her as “Mother of So-and-so,” or “the kids,” as in “the kids cooked mulukhiya today,” the company understanding that he means his wife. This same man, however, will feel no embarrassment at mentioning, in a gathering of other men, the most precise details of his private relations with his wife, so that the men of the roof come to know almost everything of one another’s sexual activities. As for the women, and without regard for their degree of religiosity or morality, they all love sex enormously and will whisper the secrets of the bed to one another, followed, if they are on their own, by bursts of laughter that are carefree or even obscene. They do not love it simply as a way of quenching lust but because sex, and their husbands’ greed for it, makes them feel that despite all the misery they suffer they are still women, beautiful and desired by their menfolk. At that certain moment when the children are asleep, having had their dinner and given praise to their Lord, and there is enough food in the house to last for a week or more, and there is a little money set aside for emergencies, and the room they all live in is clean and tidy, and the husband has come home on Thursday night in a good mood because of the effect of the hashish and asked for his wife, is it not then her duty to obey his call, after first bathing, prettying herself up, and putting on perfume? Do these brief hours of pleasure not furnish her with proof that her wretched life is somehow, despite everything, blessed with success? It would take a skilled painter to convey to us the expressions on the face of a woman on the roof of a Friday morning, when, after her husband has gone down to perform the prayer and she has washed off the traces of love-making, she emerges to hang out the washed bedding — at that moment, with her wet hair, her flushed complexion, and the serene expression in her eyes, she looks like a rose that, watered with the dew of the morning, has arrived at the peak of its perfection.

The darkness of night was receding, heralding a new morning, and a dim, small light on the roof shone from the window of the room belonging to Shazli the doorkeeper, where his teenage son Taha had spent the night sleepless with anxiety. Now he performed the dawn prayer, plus the two superrogatory prostrations, then sat on the bed in his white gallabiya reading from The Book of Answered Prayer and repeating in a frail whisper in the silence of the room, “O God, I ask You for whatever good this day may hold and I take refuge with You from whatever evil it may hold and from any evil I may meet within it. O God, watch over me with Your eye that never sleeps and forgive me through Your power, that I perish not; You are my hope. My Lord, Master of Majesty and Bounty, to You I direct my face, so bring Your noble face close to me and receive me with Your unalloyed forgiveness and generosity, smiling on me and content with me in Your mercy!”

Taha continued to read the prayers until the light of morning shone into the chamber and little by little life started to stir in the iron rooms — voices, cries, laughter and coughing, doors shutting and opening, and the smell of hot water, tea, coffee, charcoal, and tobacco. For the inhabitants of the roof it was just the start of another day; Taha el Shazli, however, knew that on this day his fate would be decided forever. After a few hours, he would present himself for the character interview at the Police Academy — the last hurdle in the long race of hope. Since childhood, he has dreamed of being a police officer and has devoted all his efforts to realizing that dream. He has applied himself to memorizing everything for the general secondary examination and as a result obtained a score of 98 percent (Humanities) without private tutoring (apart from a few review groups at the school, for which his father had only just been able to come up with the money). During summer vacations he joined the Abdeen Youth Center (for ten pounds a month) and put up with the exhausting body-building exercises in order to acquire the athletic physique that would allow him to pass the physical fitness tests at the Police Academy.

In order to realize this dream, Taha has courted the police officers in the district until they are all his friends, both those of the Kasr el Nil police station and of the Kotzika substation that belongs to it. From them, Taha has learned all the details relating to the admission tests for the police and found out too about the twenty thousand pounds that the well-to-do pay as a bribe to ensure their children’s acceptance into the college (and how he wishes he possessed such a sum!). In order to realize this dream, Taha el Shazli has also put up with the meanness and the arrogance of the building’s inhabitants.

Since he was little he had helped his father run errands for people, and when his intelligence and academic excellence manifested themselves, the inhabitants reacted in different ways. Some encouraged him to study, gave him generous gifts, and prophesied a glorious future for him. Others, however (and there were many of these), were somehow disturbed by the idea of “the high-flying doorkeeper’s son” and tried to convince his father to enroll him in vocational training as soon as he finished intermediary school “so that he can learn a trade that will be of use to you and to himself,” as they would say to elderly “uncle” Shazli, with a show of concern for his welfare. When Taha enrolled in general secondary school and continued to do well, they would send for him on exam days and entrust him with difficult tasks that would take a long time, tipping him generously to tempt him, while concealing a malign desire to keep him from his studies. Taha would accept these tasks because of his need for cash but would go on wearing himself out with study, often going one or two days without sleep.

When the general secondary exam results came out and he obtained a higher score than the children of many in the building, the grumblers started to talk openly. One of them would run into another in front of the elevator and ask him sarcastically if he had offered his congratulations to the doorkeeper on his son’s high marks; then he would add bitingly that the doorkeeper’s son would soon join the Police Academy and graduate as an officer with two stars on his epaulettes. At this point the other person would candidly reveal his annoyance, first praising Taha’s character and his hard work, then going on to say in a serious tone of voice (as though he had the general principle and not the individual in mind) that jobs in the police, the judiciary, and sensitive positions in general should be given only to the children of people who were somebody because the children of doorkeepers, laundrymen, and such like, if they attained any authority, would use it to compensate for the inferiority complexes and other neuroses they had acquired during their early childhood. Then he would bring his speech to an end by cursing Abd el Nasser, who had introduced free education, or quote as authority the saying of the Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — “Teach not the children of the lowly!”

These same residents started picking on Taha when the results appeared and finding fault with him for the most trivial of reasons, such as washing the car and forgetting to put the floormats back in place, or being a few minutes late in the performance of an errand to somewhere far away, or buying ten things for them from the market and forgetting one. They would insult him deliberately and unmistakably in order to push him into responding that he would not put up with such insults because he was an educated person, which would be their golden opportunity to announce to him the truth — that here he was a mere doorkeeper, no more and no less, and if he didn’t like his job he should leave it to someone who needed it. But Taha never gave them that opportunity. He would meet their outbursts with silence, a bowed head, and a slight smile, his handsome brown face at these moments giving the impression that he did not agree with what was directed at him and that it was entirely in his power to rebut the insult but that respect for the other’s greater age prevented him from so doing.

This was one of a number of fall-back positions, tantamount to defensive tactics, that Taha used under difficult circumstances in order to express what he felt while at the same time avoiding problems, positions that had initially been a matter of acting for him but which he soon performed sincerely and as though they were the truth. For example, he did not like to sit on the doorkeeper’s bench so that he had to get up respectfully for every resident, and if he was sitting on the bench and he saw a resident coming, he would busy himself with something that would obviate his duty to stand up. Similarly, he was accustomed to addressing the residents with a carefully calculated modicum of respect and to treating them as an employee would his superior and not as a servant his master. As for the children of the residents who were close to him in age, he treated them as complete equals. He would call them by their first names and converse and play around with them like close friends, borrowing from them schoolbooks that he might not actually need in order to remind them that despite his position as a doorkeeper he was their colleague when it came to study.

These were the commonplaces of his day-to-day life — poverty, back-breaking hard work, the arrogance of the residents, and the five-pound note, always folded, that his father bestowed on him every Saturday and on which he practiced every stratagem to make last the whole week; the smooth, warm hand of a resident extended lazily and graciously from a car window to give him a tip (at the sight of which he had to raise his hand in a military-style salute and thank his benefactor enthusiastically and audibly); that look, impertinent and full of smugness or covertly sympathetic and tolerant, inspired by embarrassment at the “issue,” which he noted in the eyes of his school friends when they visited him and discovered that he lived in the doorkeeper’s quarters “up on the roof ”; that hateful, embarrassing question “Are you the doorkeeper?” that strangers to the building addressed to him; and the deliberate slowing down of the residents as they entered the building so that he would hurry to relieve them of whatever they were carrying no matter how light or unimportant.

It is with annoyances such as these that the day passes, but when Taha gets into bed at the end of the evening, it is always in a state of purity and with his ablutions made, after he has first performed the evening prayer, plus superrogatory odd and even series of prostrations. Then he stares long into the darkness of the room, gradually soaring until he beholds himself in his mind’s eye as a police officer strutting proudly in his beautiful uniform with the brass stars gleaming on his shoulder and the impressive government-issue pistol dangling from his belt. He imagines that he has married his sweetheart Busayna el Sayed and that they have moved to a suitable apartment in an up-market district far from the noise and dirt of the roof.

He firmly believed that God would make all his dreams come true — first of all because he made the utmost effort to honor God’s commandments, observing the obligatory prayers and avoiding major sins (and God had given to the observant in a noble verse of the Qur’an the good news that Had the people of the cities believed and been God-fearing, We would have opened upon them blessings from heaven and earth) and second because he had the highest expectations of God’s good intentions (given that the Almighty and Glorious had said, in words revealed to the Prophet, “I am according to my slaves’ expectations of me: if good, then good, and if bad, then bad”). And see — God had fulfilled his promise and granted him success in the general secondary exams, and he had passed, praise God, all the tests for the Police Academy. All that remained for him to do was the character interview, which he would pass that same day, God willing.

Taha rose and prayed the two morning prostrations, plus two more in supplication for the achievement of his wish, then washed, shaved, and began to get dressed. He had bought a new gray suit, a shining white shirt, and a beautiful blue tie for the character interview, and when he glanced at himself for the last time in the mirror, he looked very smart. As he kissed his mother goodbye, she put her hand on his head muttering an incantation, then started praying for him with an ardor that made his heart pound. In the lobby of the building, he found his father sitting with his legs tucked up under him on the bench as was his habit. The old man rose slowly and looked at Taha for a moment. Then he put his hand on his shoulder and smiled, his white mustache quivering and revealing his toothless mouth, and he said proudly, “Congratulations in advance, Mr. Officer!”

It was past ten o’clock and Suleiman Basha was crowded with cars and pedestrians, and most of the stores had opened their doors. It occurred to Taha that he had a whole hour ahead of him before the exam and he decided that he would take a cab for fear of spoiling his suit on the crowded buses. He wished he could spend the remaining time with Busayna. Their agreed method was that he should pass in front of the Shanan clothing store where she worked; when she saw him she would ask permission from Mr. Talal, the owner, to leave, using the excuse that she had to fetch something or other from the storeroom, and then catch up with him at their favorite place in the new garden in Tawfikiya Square.

Taha did the usual routine and sat there for about a quarter of an hour before Busayna appeared. At the sight of her, he felt his heart beating hard. He loved the way she walked, moving with small, slow steps, looking at the ground, and giving the impression that she was embarrassed or for some reason regretful, or was walking over a fragile surface with extreme care, so as not to break it with her footsteps. Noticing that she was wearing the tight-fitting red dress that revealed the details of her body and whose wide and low-cut front showed her full breasts, he experienced a surge of anger and remembered that he had quarreled with her before in an attempt to make her stop wearing it. However, he suppressed his annoyance, not wishing to spoil the occasion, and she smiled, showing her small, white, regular teeth and the two wonderful dimples on either side of her mouth and lips, which she had painted dark red. She sat down next to him on the low marble garden wall, turned toward him and looked at him, with her wide seemingly astonished honey-colored eyes and said, “What a dandy!”

He answered in an urgent whisper, “I’m going for the character interview now and I wanted to see you.”

“The Lord be with you!” said Busayna with true tenderness. His heart beat hard and at that moment he wished he could clasp her to his chest.

“Are you scared?” she asked.

“I have placed myself in the hands of God, Almighty and Glorious, and whatever Our Lord may do I shall gladly accept, God willing.”

He spoke fast, as though he had prepared the answer ahead of time or as though he were trying to convince himself with his own words. He was silent for a moment, then went on gently, looking into her eyes, “Pray for me.”

“The Lord grant you success, Taha,” she exclaimed warmly.

Then she went on, as though she thought she had gone too far in showing her feelings, “I have to go now because Mr. Talal is waiting for me.”

As she withdrew, he tried to make her stay, but she put out her hand and shook his, her eyes avoiding him, and said in an ordinary, formal way, “Best of luck.” Later, when he was sitting in the taxi, Taha reflected that Busayna’s attitude toward him had changed and there was no point in ignoring it; that he knew her well and that one look was enough for him to penetrate her innermost thoughts. He had memorized everything about her — her face, whether radiant with happiness or sad, her uncertain smile and the way she blushed when she was embarrassed, her wildcat glances and glowering (but still beautiful) features when she was angry; he even loved to look at her when she had just woken up and the traces of sleep were still on her face, making her look like a compliant, gentle-hearted child.

He loved her and he preserved in his memory the image of her as a little girl when she would play with him on the roof and he would run after her and deliberately hang on to her so that the smell of soap from her hair would tickle his nose; of her as a student at the commercial secondary school wearing the white shirt, blue skirt, and short white school socks above black shoes as she walked hugging her bag as though to hide her ripening bosom; and the beautiful images of them wandering together at the Barrages and the Zoo, and of the day when they revealed their love to each other and agreed to marry and how after that she had clung to him and asked him questions about the details of his life, as though she were his young wife looking after him. They had agreed on everything for the future, even the number of children they would have and their names and what their first apartment would look like.

Then suddenly she had changed. She had become less interested in him and took to talking about “their project” listlessly and sarcastically. She would often quarrel with him and avoid meeting him, using a variety of excuses. This had happened right after her father died. Why had she changed? Was their love just an adolescent thing to be grown out of as they got older? Or had she fallen in love with someone else? This last thought pricked him like a thorn till he bled. He started to picture Mr. Talal the Syrian (owner of the store where she worked) taking her arm in his and wearing a wedding suit.

Taha became aware of a heavy worry weighing on his heart, then awoke from his thoughts as the taxi came to a halt in front of the Police Academy building, which at that moment appeared impressive and historic, as though it were the fortress of fate in which his destiny would be decided. His exam nerves came back to him and he started reciting the Throne Verse in a whisper as he approached the gate.

The information available about Abaskharon in his youth is extremely sparse.

We don’t know what he did before the age of forty or the circumstances in which his right leg was amputated. Everything we know starts with that rainy winter’s day twenty years ago when Abaskharon arrived at the Yacoubian Building in the black Chevrolet of Madame Sanaa Fanous, a widowed Copt of Upper Egyptian origin, rich, and with two children to whose upbringing she had devoted her life following the death of her husband. Despite her devotion to her children, however, she responded from time to time to the whimsical demands of her body and Zaki el Dessouki had got to know her at the Automobile Club and had been her companion for a while. Much as she enjoyed the relationship, her religious conscience gave her no rest and would often make her break into painful tears as she lay in Zaki’s arms after the accomplishment of their pleasure and go and appease her guilt by taking on an abundance of good works through the church. Thus it was that no sooner did Borei, Zaki’s former office servant, die than she insisted on his appointing Abaskharon (whose name was on the assistance list at the church), and suddenly there he was, standing hunched up like a mouse and staring at the ground, at his first meeting with Zaki Bey, who was so disappointed at his shabby appearance, his amputated leg, and his crutches, which marked him with the stamp of a beggar, that he said sarcastically to his friend Sanaa in French, “But, my dear, I’m running an office, not a charity!”

She continued trying to win him over with blandishments until in the end he grudgingly agreed to employ Abaskharon, with the idea that he would do what she wanted for a few days then throw him out… but here they were! Abaskharon had demonstrated from the first day an unusual competence: he had an uncommon capacity for uninterrupted, exhausting work and even asked the Bey daily to give him new things to add to his list of duties. He also possessed a sharp intelligence, adroitness, and shrewdness, which made him do the right thing in any given situation and with a capacity for absolute discretion, for he would see and hear nothing of what took place in front of him, be it even murder.

By dint of these great virtues, before a few months had passed Zaki Bey couldn’t do without Abaskharon for so much as an hour. He even had a new bell put in the kitchen of the apartment so that he could summon him whenever he needed him, and he gave him a generous salary and allowed him to stay overnight in the office (which was something he hadn’t done with anyone before). Abaskharon for his part had fathomed the Bey’s nature from the first day and realized that his master was self-indulgent, a pleasure-seeker, and given to sudden whims and caprices and that his head was rarely free of the effect of narcotics. This sort of man (as per Abaskharon’s wide experience of life) was quick to get angry and had a sharp temper but rarely did any harm, and the worst that one was likely to suffer from him was verbal abuse or a dressing down. Abaskharon promised himself that he would never argue with or question his master about what he asked for and that he would always take the initiative in apologizing and ingratiating himself, in order to gain his affection. Likewise he never addressed him by any term other than “Excellency,” which he would insert into any sentence he uttered. Thus, if the Bey asked him, for example, “What time is it now?” Abaskharon would reply, “Five o’clock, Excellency.”

To tell the truth, Abaskharon’s adaptation to his work is somewhat reminiscent of a biological phenomenon. Thus, in the midst of the quiet darkness that reigns over the apartment during the daylight hours and of the ancient musty smell that emanates from the mixing of the scent of old furniture with that of the damp and of the double-strength carbolic acid that the Bey insists be used to clean the bathroom — in this “medium,” when Abaskharon emerges from one of the corners of the apartment with his crutches, his ever-dirty gallabiya, his aged hang-dog face, and his ingratiating smile, he seems like a creature functioning effectively in its natural surroundings, like a fish in water, or a cockroach in the drain. Indeed whenever for some reason he leaves the Yacoubian Building and walks down the sunny street through the passersby and the noise of the cars, he looks odd and out of place, like a bat in daylight, and his integrity is restored only when he returns to the office where he has spent two decades concealed in darkness and damp.

We must not, however, be fooled into thinking of Abaskharon as no more than an obedient servant, for the truth is that there is much more to him than that, and behind his servile, weak exterior lies concealed a strong will and precise goals that he will fight courageously and obstinately to achieve. In addition to the raising and educating of his three daughters, he has taken on his shoulders the care of his younger brother Malak and his children too. This gives us the clue to understanding what he does every evening when, alone in his small room, he extracts from the pocket of his gallabiya every coin and small, sweat-soaked, folded banknote, whether obtained directly as tips or that he has succeeded in filching from the purchases for the office. (Abaskharon’s brokering methods may be taken as a model of precise, skillful fraud, for he does not, like an amateur, inflate the prices of what he buys, since the prices are known, or may be known, at any moment. Instead he will, for example, filch each day from the coffee, tea, and sugar an amount too small to be noticed, then repackage the stolen provisions in new bags and resell them to Zaki Bey, presenting genuine invoices that he has obtained through a private agreement with the pious, bearded Muslim grocer on Marouf Street.)

In the evening, before retiring to his bed, Abaskharon counts his money twice with care, then pulls out the little blue indelible pencil that he always keeps behind his ear and writes down the balance of his earnings, subtracting from them the amount he is going to save (which he will place in his savings account on Sunday and never thereafter touch), then pay off mentally out of the remainder of what he has received the needs of his large family. And whether he has anything left over after that or not, Abaskharon, the believing Christian, cannot sleep until he has chanted the prayer of thanks to the Lord, his voice reverberating in the silence of the night as he whispers with genuine piety before the figure of the crucified Christ that hangs on the kitchen wall, “because, O Lord, Thou hast fed me and fed my children; thus, I praise You as Your name is glorified in Heaven. Amen.”

A word, unavoidably, about Malak.

The fingers of the hand differ from one another in appearance, but all move together in coordination to carry out a given task. Similarly, on the soccer pitch, the mid-field player shoots the ball with the utmost precision to land at the feet of the striker so that he can score a goal. Abaskharon’s relationship with his brother Malak was conducted with the same extraordinary harmony.

Malak learned tailoring in shirt-making workshops when he was young; thus domestic service has not left its stamp of abjection upon him, and the fact is his short stature, his cheap, dark-colored “people’s suit,” his huge belly, and his plump face devoid of any good looks leave a disturbing first impression. However, he hastens to take the initiative with anyone he meets by smiling his broad smile and shaking his hand warmly, talking to him like an old friend and concurring with all his opinions (so long as they do not touch his vital interests), then insistently offering him a Cleopatra cigarette from the wrinkled pack that he carefully extracts from his pocket, checking each time that it is okay, as though it were a jewel. This excessive pleasantness has another side to it, however. If necessary, Malak will switch, in an instant and with the greatest of ease, to the utterly foul language that is to be expected of someone who has received most of his upbringing on the street. Since he combines two opposites — viciousness and cowardice, the violent desire to hurt his opponents and excessive fear of the consequences — he has become accustomed in his battles to attacking with everything he has. If he finds no resistance, he will go to any lengths in his aggression, without the slightest mercy, as though he doesn’t know the meaning of fear. And if he meets with serious resistance from his foe, he will back off immediately without thinking twice. To all these high-level skills of Malak’s are added the sagacity and cunning of Abaskharon, so that the two of them work together in perfect coordination and are able, truth to tell, to pull off the most amazing feats.

The two brothers wanted to get a room on the roof, so they had planned and schemed for many months till, on this very day, the hour for action had arrived and no sooner had Rabab entered to see Zaki Bey than Abaskharon, standing in the doorway, bowed and said with a slight, crafty smile, “Excellency. Your permission to run a quick errand?” Before he had finished the sentence, the Bey (who was preoccupied with his girlfriend) had gestured to him to go. Abaskharon closed the door quietly, and his face, as his wooden crutches struck the tiles of the hallway, seemed to change. The servile, ingratiating smile disappeared and a serious, anxious expression appeared in its place. Abaskharon made for the small kitchen that was next to the entrance to the apartment and looked around cautiously. Then he stretched up, leaning on a crutch, until he was able carefully to remove the picture of the Virgin that hung on the wall and behind which was a niche. Sticking his hand into this, he pulled out several large bundles of banknotes, which he set about concealing carefully in his vest and pockets. Then he left the apartment, closing the door gently and firmly behind him. Reaching the entrance of the building, he turned, using his crutch, to the right and approached the doorkeeper’s room, from which his brother Malak, who had been waiting for him, quickly emerged. The brothers exchanged a single look of understanding and a few minutes later were making their way down Suleiman Basha on their way to the Automobile Club to meet Fikri Abd el Shaheed, the lawyer who was the agent for the Yacoubian Building.

They had prepared themselves for this meeting and talked it over between themselves for a period of months till there was nothing left to discuss. Thus, they proceeded in silence, though Abaskharon started to mutter prayers to the Virgin and Christ the Savior to grant them success in their mission. Malak, on the other hand, was racking his brains for the most effective words with which to open the conversation with Fikri Bey. He had spent the last weeks gathering information about him and was now aware that the man would do anything for money and that he liked drink and women. He had been to meet him at his office on Kasr el Nil Street and presented him with a gift of a bottle of fine Old Parr whisky before opening the subject of the iron room at the entrance to the roof that had been left empty by the death of Atiya, the newspaper seller, who had lived and died unmarried, his room thus reverting to the owner. Malak had been dreaming of opening this room as a shirt shop ever since he had turned thirty and found himself still a journeyman, moving from store to store as circumstances required. When he broached the topic, Fikri Bey asked for time to think and after much pressure from Malak and his brother had agreed to give it to them in return for the sum of six thousand pounds and not a penny less, and had given them an appointment at the Automobile Club, where he was accustomed to take lunch every Sunday. When the brothers reached the club, Abaskharon felt overwhelmed at the grandness of the place and stared at the real marble that covered the walls and the floor and the luxurious red carpet that extended up to the elevator. Malak seemed to sense this and pressed his arm in encouragement, then advanced and warmly shook hands with the doorman of the club, asking him for Fikri Abd el Shaheed. In preparation for this day, Malak had got to know the workers at the Automobile Club over the past two weeks and gained their friendship with kind, flattering words and a few white gallabiyas that he had presented them as gifts. The waiters and workers hastened therefore to welcome the brothers and led them to the restaurant on the second floor where Fikri Bey was taking lunch with a fat white lady friend of his. Naturally, it wouldn’t do for the brothers to interrupt the Bey, so they sent someone to him to inform him of their presence and waited for him in a side room.

Only a few minutes passed before Fikri Abd el Shaheed appeared, with his corpulent body, his large bald patch, and his face ruddy and white as a foreigner’s; it became immediately obvious from the redness of his eyes and the slight slur in his speech that he had drunk a lot. After the greetings and compliments Abaskharon launched into a long interlude in praise of the Bey, his kind-heartedness, and his similarity in all his doings to Christ. He went on to tell (his brother Malak listening attentively and with affected admiration) how the Bey would exempt many of his clients from the costs of cases if he was sure that they had been wronged and were poor and unable to pay.

“Do you know, Malak, what Fikri Bey says to a poor client if he tries to pay?” Having posed the question, Abaskharon quickly answered it himself. “He says, ‘Go and prostrate yourself in thanks to the Lord Jesus, for He has paid me the fees for your case in full!’ ” Malak sucked his lips, folded his hands over his protruding stomach, looked at the ground as though completely overcome, and said, “There you see a true Christian!”

Fikri Bey, however, though drunk, was attentive to the way the conversation was going and did not much like its drift; so to bring matters to a head he said in a no-nonsense tone, “Did you bring the money as agreed?”

“Of course, Your Honor,” cried Abaskharon, as he handed him two pieces of paper. “Here’s the contract as agreed with Your Honor, and God bless you.”

Then he thrust his hand into his vest to pull out the money. He had brought the agreed-upon six thousand, but had distributed the notes about his person in order to leave himself room for maneuver. He started by pulling out four thousand pounds and held out his hand with these in it to the Bey, who cried out angrily, “What’s that? Where’s the rest?” At this, the brothers burst out with one voice, as though singing an aria, into a joint plea — Abaskharon in his hoarse, phlegmy, panting tones and Malak in his sharp, high-pitched, loud ones, their words overlapping until they became incomprehensible, though taken as a whole they were intended to awaken the Bey’s sympathy by speaking of their poverty and noting that they had, by the Living Christ, gone into debt to get the money and that in all honesty they were unable to pay more than that. Fikri Bey didn’t relent for a second. Indeed he got angrier and saying, “This is how children behave! This is no use to me!” he turned around to go back into the restaurant. Abaskharon, however, who had been expecting this move, threw himself so forcefully toward the Bey that he stumbled and was about to fall but with a lightning movement pulled another bundle of notes, worth a thousand pounds, out of the pocket of his gallabiya and thrust it with the other bundles into the pocket of the Bey, who displayed no serious resistance and allowed this to happen. At this Abaskharon was obliged to launch into another interlude of pleading during which he attempted to kiss the Bey’s hand more than once and finally brought his ardent importunities to a close with a special move that he kept in reserve for emergencies, suddenly bending his torso backward and pulling his worn, dirty gallabiya upward with both hands so that his truncated leg, attached to the depressingly dark-colored prosthesis, was displayed. In a hoarse, disjointed, voice designed to evoke pity he shouted, “I’m a cripple, sir, and my leg’s gone! A cripple with a parcel of children to look after, and Malak has four children and their mother to support! If you love the Lord Christ, sir, don’t turn me away brokenhearted!”

This was more than Fikri Bey could withstand and a little while later the three of them were sitting and signing the contract — Fikri Bey, who was furious at what he afterward called, as he recounted what had happened to his lady friend, “moral blackmail,” Malak, who was thinking about the first steps he would take in his new room on the roof and Abaskharon, who kept in place on his face his final, affecting expression (a sad, broken look, as though he had been vanquished and subjected to unbearable burdens); inside, however, he was happy both because the rental contract had been signed and because he had managed with his skill to save a one-thousand-pound bundle, whose delicious warmth he could feel in the right-hand pocket of his gallabiya.

Downtown remained, for at least a hundred years, the commercial and social center of Cairo, where were situated the biggest banks, the foreign companies, the stores, the clinics and the offices of famous doctors and lawyers, the cinemas, and the luxury restaurants. Egypt’s former elite had built the downtown area to be Cairo’s European quarter, to the degree that you would find streets that looked the same as those to be found in any of the capitals of Europe, with the same style of architecture and the same venerable historic veneer. Until the beginning of the 1960s, Downtown retained its pure European stamp and old-timers doubtless can still remember that elegance. It was considered quite inappropriate for natives to wander around in Downtown in their gallabiyas and impossible for them to be allowed in this same traditional dress into restaurants such as Groppi’s, A l’Americaine, and the Odeon, or even the Metro, Saint James, and Radio cinemas, and other places that required their patrons to wear, for men, suits, and, for the ladies, evening dresses. The stores all shut their doors on Sundays, and on the Catholic Christian holidays, such as Christmas and New Year’s, Downtown was decorated all over, as though it were in a foreign capital. The glass frontages scintillated with holiday greetings in French and English, Christmas trees, and figures representing Father Christmas, and the restaurants and bars overflowed with foreigners and aristocrats who celebrated with drinking, singing, and dancing.

Downtown had always been full of small bars where people could take a few glasses and tasty dishes of hors d’œuvres in their free time and on weekends at a reasonable price. In the thirties and forties, some bars offered in addition to the drinks small entertainments by a Greek or Italian musician or a troupe of foreign Jewish women dancers. Up to the end of the 1960s, there were on Suleiman Basha alone almost ten small bars. Then came the 1970s, and the downtown area started gradually to lose its importance, the heart of Cairo moving to where the new elite lived, in El Mohandiseen and Medinet Nasr. An inexorable wave of religiosity swept Egyptian society and it became no longer socially acceptable to drink alcohol. Successive Egyptian governments bowed to the religious pressure (and perhaps attempted to outbid politically the opposition Islamist current) by restricting the sale of alcohol to the major hotels and restaurants and stopped issuing licenses for new bars; if the owner of a bar (usually a foreigner) died, the government would cancel the bar’s license and require the heirs to change the nature of their business. On top of all this there were constant police raids on bars, during which the officers would frisk the patrons, inspect their identity cards, and sometimes accompany them to the police station for interrogation.

Thus it was that as the 1980s dawned, there remained in the whole of Downtown only a few, scattered, small bars, whose owners had been able to hang on in the face of the rising tide of religion and government persecution. This they had been able to do by one of two methods — concealment or bribery. There was not one bar downtown that advertised its presence. Indeed, the very word “Bar” on the signs was changed to “Restaurant” or “Coffee Shop,” and the owners of bars and wine stores deliberately painted the windows of their establishments a dark color so that what went on inside could not be seen, or would place in their display windows paper napkins or any other items that would not betray their actual business. It was no longer permitted for a customer to drink on the sidewalk in front of the bar or even in front of an open window that looked on to the street, and stringent precautions had to be taken following the burning of a number of liquor stores at the hands of youths belonging to the Islamist movement.

At the same time, it was required of the few remaining bar owners that they pay large regular bribes to the plainclothes police officers to whose districts they belonged and to governorate officials in order for these to allow them to continue. Sometimes the sale of cheap locally produced alcohol would not realize enough income for them to pay the fine, so that the bar owners found themselves obliged to find “other ways” of adding to their income. Some of them turned to facilitating prostitution by using fallen women to serve the alcohol, as was the case with the Cairo Bar in El Tawfikiya, and the Mido and the Pussycat on Emad el Din Street. Others turned to manufacturing alcohol in primitive laboratories instead of buying it, so as to increase profits, as at the Halegian Bar on Antikkhana Street and the Jamaica on Sherif Street. These disgusting industrially produced drinks led to a number of unfortunate accidents, the most celebrated of which befell a young artist who lost his sight after drinking bad brandy at the Halegian Bar. The public prosecutor’s office ordered the bar closed, but its owner was able to reopen later, using the usual methods.

Consequently, the small remaining downtown bars were no longer cheap, clean places for recreation as they had been before. Instead, they had turned into badly lit, poorly ventilated dens frequented mostly by hooligans and criminal types, though there were a few exceptions to this rule, such as Maxim’s in the passage between Kasr el Nil and Suleiman Basha streets, and the Chez Nous, located beneath the Yacoubian Building.

The Chez Nous is a few steps below street level, and thanks to the thick curtains the lighting is dim and shadowy even during the day. The large bar is to the left and the tables are benches of natural wood painted a dark color. The old lanterns of Viennese design, the works of art sculpted from wood or bronze and hung on the wall, the Latin-script writing on the paper tablecloths, and the huge beer glasses — all these things give the bar the appearance of an English “pub.” In summer, as soon as you penetrate the Chez Nous, leaving behind you Suleiman Basha with its noise, heat, and crowds, and seat yourself to drink an ice-cold beer in the midst of the quiet, the powerful air conditioning, and the low, relaxing lighting, you feel as though you had gone into hiding from daily life in some way. This feeling of privacy is the great distinguishing feature of Chez Nous, which made its name basically as a meeting place for homosexuals (and which has made its way into more than one Western tourist guide under this rubric).

The owner of the bar is called Aziz. He is nicknamed “the Englishman” (because, with his white complexion, yellow hair, and blue eyes, he resembles one) and he is a victim of that same condition. They say he took up with the old Greek who used to own the bar and that the latter fell in love with him and made him a present of the establishment before his death. They whisper too that he organizes outrageous parties at which he introduces homosexuals to Arab tourists and that homosexual prostitution brings him in huge profits with which he pays the bribes that have made his place into a safe haven from the annoying attentions of the security forces. He is blessed with a strong presence and savoir-faire, and under his supervision and care homosexuals meet at Chez Nous and form friendships there, released from the social pressures that prevent them from advertising their tendencies.

Places where homosexuals meet are like hashish cafes and gambling dens in that their patrons belong to all social levels and are of varying ages. You find among them skilled workers and professionals, young people and old, all united by their homosexuality. By the same token, homosexuals, like burglars, pickpockets, and all other groups outside the laws and norms of society, have created for themselves a special language that enables them to understand one another when among strangers. Thus, they call a passive homosexual a “kudyana” and give him a girl’s name by which he is known among them, such as Souad, Angie, Fatma, and so on. They call an active homosexual a “barghal,” and if he is ignorant and simple, they call him a “rough barghal.” They call male-to-male sex a “hook-up.” They make themselves known to one another and hold secret conversations by means of hand movements. Thus, if one of them takes the other’s hand and strokes his wrist with his finger while shaking it, that means that he desires him, and if a man brings two fingers together and moves them while talking to someone, this means that he is inviting his interlocutor to have sex, and if he points to his heart with one finger, it means that his lover has sole possession of his heart, and so on.

Just as Aziz the Englishman looks out for the comfort and good cheer of the Chez Nous patrons, so by the same token he permits them no indecent behavior. As the night and the patrons’ indulgence in drink progress, their voices grow louder, rise in pitch, and interrupt one another, for the desire to talk takes possession of them, as happens in all bars. The drunkards at Chez Nous, however, fall prey to a combination of lust and intoxication, exchanging endearments and dirty jokes, and one of them will sometimes stretch out his fingers to caress his friend’s body — at which point, Aziz the Englishman intervenes at once, using every means to re-impose order, starting with a polite whisper and ending with a threat to throw the delinquent customer out of the bar. Often the Englishman gets so excited that his face turns red while he berates the homosexual whose lust has been aroused, saying, “Listen. As long as you’re at my place, behave yourself. If you fancy your friend that much, get up and go off with him, but don’t you lay a hand on him in this bar!”

The Englishman’s sternness here does not stem from any concern for morality of course but from calculations of profit and loss, since plainclothes officers often visit the bar. True, they satisfy themselves with a quick glance from a distance and don’t disturb the patrons at all (thanks to the large bribes they receive), but if they were to witness any scandalous act there, they would make a huge fuss, since that would be their opportunity to blackmail the Englishman into paying even more.

A little before midnight, the door of the bar opened and Hatim Rasheed appeared with a dark-complexioned young man in his twenties wearing inexpensive clothes, his hair cropped like a soldier’s. The people in the bar were drunk, shouting and singing loudly. All the same, as soon as Hatim entered, their racket diminished and they took to observing him with curiosity and a certain awe. They knew that he was a kudyana, but a forbidding natural reserve prevented them from acting familiarly with him and even the most impudent and obscene of the customers could do no other than treat him with respect.

There were a number of reasons for this. Hatim Rasheed is a well-known journalist and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Caire , which comes out in Cairo in French. He is an aristocrat of ancient lineage whose mother was French and whose father was Dr. Hassan Rasheed, the famous jurist and dean of the College of Law in the 1950s. In addition, Hatim Rasheed is a conservative homosexual, if that is the right expression: he does not sacrifice his dignity, put powder on his face, or stoop to using provocative ways as do many kudyanas. In appearance and behavior he always chooses a skillful compromise between elegance and femininity. Tonight, for instance, he is wearing a dark wine-red suit and has knotted around his slender neck a yellow scarf, most of which he has tucked under his pink, natural-silk shirt, the two ends of the latter’s broad collar flopping over the front of his jacket. With his smart clothes, svelte figure, and fine French features, he would look like a scintillating movie star were it not for the wrinkles that his riotous life has left on his face and that sad, mysterious, gloomy look that often haunts the faces of homosexuals.

Aziz the Englishman went toward him to welcome him and Hatim shook his hand affectionately, gesturing gracefully toward his young friend and saying, “My friend Abd Rabbuh, who’s doing his military service in Central Security.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Aziz, smiling and looking the strong, muscular young man over. Then he led his two guests to a quiet table at the end of the bar and took their orders — gin and tonic for Hatim, an imported beer for Abd Rabbuh, and some hot hors d’œuvres. Gradually, the customers lost interest in them and resumed their talk and raucous laughter.

The two friends appeared to be engrossed in a long and wearisome argument, Hatim speaking in a low voice and looking at his friend as though trying to convince him of something, Abd Rabbuh listening unmoved and then replying vehemently. Hatim would remain silent for a moment, his head bowed, then resume the attempt. The conversation went on this way for almost half an hour, during which the two companions drank two bottles of beer and three glasses of gin, and at the end of which Hatim leaned his back once more against the back of the seat and directed a penetrating glance at Abduh.

“That’s your last word?”

Abduh replied in a loud voice, the alcohol having gone quickly to his head, “Yes!”

“Abduh, come with me tonight and we’ll work things out in the morning.”

“No.”

“Please, Abduh.”

“No.”

“Very well. Can we work things out quietly? None of that quick temper of yours!” whispered Hatim winningly, touching with his fingers his friend’s huge hand as it lay on the table. This insistence seemed to exasperate Abduh who let out his breath in annoyance and said, “I told you I can’t stay with you tonight. I was late three times last week because of you. The officer will refer me for disciplining.”

“Don’t worry! I’ve found someone who can put in a good word for you with the officer.”

“Ouff!” screamed Abduh with annoyance, pushing the beer glass with his hand so that it fell over with a ringing crash. Then he got up, directed an angry look at Hatim, and rushed to the exit. Hatim pulled some notes out of his wallet, threw them on the table, and hurried after his friend. For a few moments, silence reigned in the bar. Then the drunken comments rang out:

“A barghal with attitude, me boys!”

“Pity the one who loves and can’t get no satisfaction!”

“What to do, Honey, now you done used up all my money?”

The men laughed uproariously and burst enthusiastically and with resonant voices into a round of indecent songs, so that Aziz the Englishman was obliged to intervene to restore order.

Like most Egyptians from the countryside, Muhammad el Sayed, cook’s assistant at the Automobile Club, had suffered from bilharzia, which he contracted early on in life and which had led to inflammation and failure of the liver by the time he reached fifty. Busayna, his eldest daughter, remembers well the day in Ramadan when, after the family had eaten its breakfast meal in their small apartment with its two rooms and a latrine on the roof of the Yacoubian Building and her father had gone to perform the evening prayer, they suddenly heard the sound of some thing heavy falling to the ground. Busayna remembers too her mother’s agonized scream, “Go help your father!” They all ran to him — Busayna, Sawsan, Fatin, and little Mustafa. Their father was lying on the bed in his white gallabiya, his body completely still and his face a dull blue. Once they had called the ambulance and the raw young doctor had made a quick examination and announced the sad news, the girls let out piercing screams and their mother started slapping hard at her face, keeping it up till she fell to the floor.

At the time Busayna was studying for a commercial diploma and had dreams for the future that it would never have occurred to her might not come true: she was going to graduate and marry her sweetheart Taha el Shazli after he graduated from the Police Academy, and they would live in a nice spacious apartment a long way from the Yacoubian roof, and they would have just one boy and one girl so that they could raise them properly. They had everything worked out, but her father had died suddenly and with the passing of the mourning period the family found itself destitute. The pension was meager and did not cover the costs of schooling, food, clothes, and rent. Her mother soon changed. She always wore black, her body withered and dried out, and her face took on that stern, masculine, prickly look that poor widows have. Little by little she grew bad-tempered and took to quarreling all the time with the girls; even little Mustafa wasn’t spared her beatings and abuse. After each scene she would abandon herself to a long bout of crying. She stopped talking about the departed with the great affection she had shown in the early days and instead starting talking about him in a bitter and disappointed way, as though he had let her down and deliberately left her in this mess. She started disappearing two or three days a week, leaving in the morning and returning at the end of the day exhausted, silent, and distracted, carrying bags of cooked food all mixed up together (rice and vegetables and little bits of meat or chicken) which she would heat and give them to eat.

The day Busayna passed her exams and got her diploma her mother waited until night had fallen and the rest of the family was asleep and took her out onto the roof. It was a hot summer night and men were smoking goza and chatting the evening away while a few women were sitting in the open air to escape the heat of their cramped iron rooms. The mother greeted them and pulled Busayna by her hand to a distant part of the roof, where they stood next to the wall. Busayna can still recall the sight of the cars and the lights of Suleiman Basha as they appeared that night from the roof, along with her mother’s frowning face, her stern, penetrating looks, and her harsh, strange voice as she spoke to her of the burden the departed had left her with to endure on her own, and informed her that she was working in the house of some good-hearted people in Zamalek but had kept it a secret so that it wouldn’t affect Busayna’s or her sisters’ marriage prospects (when people found out that their mother was working as a maid). The mother asked Busayna to look for a job for herself, starting the next day. Busayna did not reply but looked at her mother for a little, overwhelmed by tenderness. Then she bent down toward her and hugged her. It occurred to her as she kissed her that her face had gotten dry and coarse and that a new, strange smell came off her body — the smell of sweat mixed with dust that maids give off.

The next day Busayna put everything she had in her into finding a job and in one year she went through lots — secretary in a lawyer’s office, assistant to a women’s hairdresser, trainee nurse at a dentist’s. Every job she left for the same reason and after going through the same rigmarole — the warm welcome from the boss accompanied by enormous, burning interest, followed by the little kindnesses and the presents and small gifts of money, with the hints that there was more where that came from, all to be met from her side with a refusal well coated in politeness (so that she wouldn’t lose the job). However, the boss would keep at it till the business reached its logical conclusion, that final scene that she hated and feared and that always came about when the older man would insist on kissing her by force in the empty office, or press up against her, or start opening his fly to confront her with some “facts on the ground.” Then she would push him away and threaten to scream and make a scene, at which point he would switch and show his vengeful face by throwing her out, after mocking her by calling her “Khadra el Shareefa.” Or sometimes he would pretend that he was just testing her morals and assure her that he loved her like his own daughter, in which case he would wait for the right time (after any danger of scandal had passed) and throw her out on any other excuse.

During that year Busayna learned a lot. She discovered, for example, that her beautiful and provocative body, her wide, dark-brown eyes and full lips, her voluptuous breasts and tremulous, rounded backside with its soft buttocks, all had an important role to play in her dealings with people. It became clear to her that all men, however respectable in appearance and however elevated their position in society, were utter weaklings in front of a beautiful woman. This drove her to try out some wicked but entertaining tests. Thus, if she met a respectable old man whom she thought it would be fun to test, she would put on a girlish voice and bend over and stick out her voluptuous breasts, then immediately enjoy the sight of the sober-sided gentleman going soft and trembly, his eyes clouding over with desire. The way men panted after her gave her a gloating pleasure similar to that of revenge. It also became clear to her during that year that her mother had changed completely, for whenever Busayna left a job because of the men’s importunities, her mother would greet the news with a silence akin to exasperation and on one occasion, after it had happened several times, she told Busayna as she got up to leave the room, “Your brother and sisters need every penny you earn. A clever girl can look after herself and keep her job.” This sentence saddened and puzzled Busayna, who asked herself, “How can I look after myself when faced with a boss who opens his fly?”

She remained in the same state of puzzlement for many long weeks, until Fifi, the daughter of Sabir the laundryman, who was a neighbor of theirs on the roof, appeared. She had heard that Busayna was looking for work and had come to tell her about a job as a salesgirl at the Shanan clothing store. When Busayna told her about her problem with earlier bosses, Fifi let out a great sigh, struck her on her chest, and shouted in her face in disbelief, “Don’t be a fool, girl!” Fifi explained to her that more than ninety percent of bosses did that with the girls who worked for them and that any girl who refused was thrown out and a hundred other girls who didn’t object could be found to take her place. When Busayna started to object, Fifi asked her sarcastically, “So Your Ladyship has an MBA from the American University? Why, the beggars in the street have commercial diplomas the same as you!”

Fifi explained to her that going along with the boss “up to a point” was just being smart and that the world was one thing and what she saw in Egyptian movies was another. She explained to her that she knew lots of girls who had worked for years at the Shanan store and given Mr. Talal, the owner of the store, what he wanted “up to a point” and were now happily married with kids, homes, and husbands who loved them lots. “But why go so far afield?” Fifi asked, citing herself as an example. She had worked in the store for two years and her salary was a hundred pounds, but she earned at least three times that much by “being smart,” not to mention the presents. And all the same, she had been able to look after herself, she was a virgin, and she’d scratch out the eyes of anyone who said anything against her reputation. There were a hundred men who wanted to marry her, especially now that she was earning and putting her money into saving co-ops and setting money aside to pay for her trousseau.

The next day Busayna went with Fifi to Mr. Talal at the store. He turned out to be over forty, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, balding, and stout. He was snub-nosed and had a huge black mustache that hung down on either side of his mouth. Mr. Talal was not at all handsome, and Busayna found out that he was the only son, among a bunch of girls, of Hagg Shanan, a Syrian, who had come from Syria during the Union and settled in Egypt and opened this store. Once he started getting on, he had handed his business over to his only son. She learned too that he was married and that his wife was Egyptian and pretty and had borne him two sons, though despite all that his predations on women never stopped. Talal shook Busayna’s hand (giving it a squeeze) and never raised his eyes from her chest and body while he spoke. After a few minutes, she started her new job.

In just a few weeks, Fifi had taught her all she had to do: how she had to take care of her appearance, paint her fingernails and her toenails, open the neck of her dress a little, and take her dresses in a bit at the waist to show off her backside. It was her job to open the store in the morning and mop it out along with her colleagues, then set her clothes straight and stand at the door (a way of attracting customers familiar to all the clothing stores). When she had a customer, she had to talk to him nicely, comply with his requests, and persuade him to buy as much as possible (she got a half of one percent of the value of all sales). Naturally, she had to put up with the customers’ flirting, however obnoxious.

That was the job. As for “the other thing,” Mr. Talal started in on it the third day after she came. It was the time of the afternoon prayer and the store was empty of customers. Talal asked her to go with him to the storeroom so that he could explain to her the different items they had in stock. Busayna followed him without a word, noting the shadow of an ironic smile on the faces of Fifi and the other girls.

The storeroom consisted of a large apartment on the ground floor in the building next to the A l’Americaine cafe on Suleiman Basha. Talal entered and locked the door from the inside. She looked about her. The place was damp and badly lit and ventilated and was stacked to the ceiling with boxes. She knew what was coming and had readied herself on the way to the storeroom, repeating to herself in her head her mother’s words, “Your brother and sisters need every penny you earn. A clever girl can look after herself and keep her job.” When Mr. Talal came close to her, she was struck by strong and conflicting feelings — determination to make the best of the opportunity and the fear which despite everything still wracked her and made her fight for breath and feel as though she was about to be sick. There was also a sneaking, covert curiosity that urged her to find out what Mr. Talal would do to her. Would he woo her and tell her, “I love you,” for example, or try to kiss her right away? She found out quickly enough because Talal pounced on her from behind, flung his arms around her hard enough to hurt her and started rubbing up against her and playing with her body without uttering a single word. He was violent and in a hurry to get his pleasure and the whole business was over in about two minutes. Her dress was soiled and he whispered to her, panting, “The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor on the right.”

As she washed her dress in the water, she thought to herself that the whole thing was easier than she’d imagined, like some man rubbing up against her in the bus (something that happened a lot) and she remembered what Fifi had told her to do after the encounter. She went back to Talal and said to him in a voice she made as smooth and seductive as she could, “I need twenty pounds from you, sir.” Talal looked at her for a moment, then quickly thrust his hand into his pocket as though he had been expecting the request and said in an ordinary voice as he took out a folded banknote, “Nah. Ten’s enough. Come back to the store after me as soon as your dress is dry.” Then he went out, closing the door behind him.

Ten pounds a time, and Mr. Talal would ask for her twice, sometimes three times a week, and Fifi had taught her how from time to time to show her liking for a dress in the shop and keep on at Talal until he made her a present of it. She started making money and wearing nice clothes and her mother was pleased with her and was comforted by the money that she took from her and tucked into the front of her dress, uttering warm blessings for her after doing so. Listening to these, Busayna was overwhelmed with a mysterious, malign desire to start giving her mother clear hints about her relationship with Talal, but her mother would ignore any such messages. Busayna would then go to such lengths with her hints that the mother’s refusal to acknowledge them became obvious and extremely fragile, at which point Busayna would feel some relief, as though she had snatched away her mother’s mask of false innocence and confirmed her complicity in the crime.

As time passed her rendezvous with Talal in the storeroom had an impact on her that she would never have imagined. She found herself no longer able to perform the morning prayer (the only one of the required prayers that she had performed) because inwardly she was ashamed to face “Our Lord,” because she felt herself unclean, however much she performed the ablutions. She started having nightmares and would start up from her sleep terrified. She would go for days depressed and melancholy and one day when she went with her mother to visit the tomb of El Hussein, no sooner had she entered the sanctuary and found herself surrounded by the incense and lights and felt that deeply-rooted hidden presence that fills the heart than she burst into a long, unexpected bout of weeping.

On the other hand, since retreat was not an option and she could not stand her feelings of sin, she started to resist the latter fiercely. She took to thinking of her mother’s face as she told her that she was working as a servant in people’s houses. She would repeat to herself what Fifi had said about the world and how it worked and often she would contemplate the shop’s rich, chic, women customers and ask herself with spiteful passion, “I wonder how many times that woman surrendered her body to get to where she is now?”

This violent resistance to her feelings of guilt left a legacy of bitterness and cruelty. She stopped trusting people or making excuses for them. She would often think (and then seek forgiveness) that God had wanted her to fall. If He had wanted otherwise, He would have created her a rich woman or delayed her father’s death a few years (and what could have been easier for Him?). Little by little, her resentment extended to include her sweetheart Taha himself. A strange feeling that she was stronger than he was by far would creep over her — a feeling that she was mature and understood the world, while he was just a dreamy, naive boy. She started to get annoyed at his optimism about the future and speak sharply to him, mocking him by saying, “You think you’re Abd el Halim Hafez? The poor, hard-working boy whose dreams will come true if he struggles?”

At first, Taha didn’t understand the reason for this bitterness. Then her sarcasm at his expense started to provoke him and they would quarrel, and when he asked her once to stop working for Talal because he had a bad reputation, she looked at him challengingly and said, “At your service, sir. Give me the two hundred and fifty pounds that I earn from Talal and you’ll have the right to stop me showing my face to anyone but you.” He stared at her for a moment as though he did not understand and then his anger erupted and he shoved her on the shoulder. She screamed insults at him and threw at him an outfit in silver he’d bought for her. In the depths of her heart, she craved to rip her relationship with him to pieces so that she might be freed of that painful feeling of sin that tortured her as soon as she set eyes on him, yet it was not in her power to leave him completely. She loved him and they had a long history full of beautiful moments. The instant she saw him sad or anxious, she would forget everything and envelop him in genuine, overflowing tenderness as though she was his mother. However bad the quarrels between them got, she would make up with him and go back to him, and their affair was not without rare and wonderful times. Very soon, however, the gloom would return.

Busayna spent the whole day blaming herself for her cruelty to him that morning when he had been in need of a word of encouragement from her as he set off for a test that she knew he had been waiting for for many years. How cruel that had been of her! What would it have hurt her to encourage him with a word and a smile? If only she had spent a little time with him! After work she found herself anxious to meet him, so she went to Tawfikiya Square and sat waiting for him on the wall of the flowerbed where they usually met each evening. Night had fallen and the square was crowded with passersby and vendors; sitting on her own she was subjected to a lot of harassment but she kept waiting for him for almost half an hour. When he didn’t come, she thought he must be angry with her because she had put him off that morning, so she got up and climbed the stairs to his room on the roof. The door was open and Taha’s mother was sitting there alone, anxiety showing on her aged face. The mother hugged her and kissed her, then sat her down next to her on the bench and said, “I’m very scared, Busayna. Taha left for the exam in the morning and still hasn’t come back. Pray God he’s all right!”

Were it not for his advanced age and the years of hardship that have left their traces on his countenance, Hagg Muhammad Azzam would look like a movie star or a crowned head, with his towering height and imperturbable gravitas, his elegance and his wealth, his face rosy with overflowing good health and his complexion all polished and shiny thanks to the skill of the experts at La Gaite Beauty Center in El Mohandiseen where he goes once a week. He owns more than a hundred suits of the most luxurious kind and wears a different one every day, with a showy necktie and elegant imported shoes.

Each day, in the middle of the morning, Hagg Azzam’s red Mercedes rolls down Suleiman Basha from the direction of the A l’Americaine with him seated in the back absorbed in telling the small amber prayer beads that never leave his hand. His day starts with an inspection of his properties — two large clothing stores, one of them opposite the A l’Americaine, the other on the ground floor of the Yacoubian Building where his office is situated; two automobile showrooms; and a number of spare parts shops in Marouf Street, not to mention a great deal of real estate in the downtown area and many other buildings that are under construction, soon to rise in the form of towering skyscrapers bearing the name Azzam Contractors. The car proceeds to stop in front of each establishment and the employees gather round it to offer the Hagg warm greetings, which he returns with a wave of his hand so restrained and insignificant that you might not notice it. The head employee or the most senior among them immediately approaches the car window, bends toward the Hagg, and briefs him on the work situation or seeks his advice on some matter. Hagg Azzam listens carefully with his head lowered, his thick eyebrows knotted, his lips pursed, then trains his narrow, gray foxy eyes (always slightly red from the effects of hashish) on the distance, as though he were watching something on the horizon. Finally he speaks, his voice deep, its intonation decisive, the words few and far between. He cannot abide chatter or disputatiousness.

Some attribute his love of silence to his application (with his strictly observant piety) of the noble hadith that says, “If one of you speaks let him be brief, or let him stay silent” — though at the same time, with his vast wealth and extraordinary influence, he does not in fact need to talk much because his word is generally final and has to be obeyed. To this should be added his wide experience of life that enables him to grasp things at a glance, for the aging millionaire, who is past sixty, started out thirty years ago as a mere migrant worker who left Sohag governorate for Cairo looking for work, and the older people on Suleiman Basha remember him sitting on the ground in the passage behind the A l’Americaine in a gallabiya, vest, and turban with a small wooden box in front of him — for that is where he started, shining shoes. He worked for a time as an office servant in the Babik office supplies store, then disappeared for more than twenty years, suddenly to reappear having made a lot of money. Hagg Azzam says that he was working in the Gulf, but the people in the street do not believe that and whisper that he was sentenced and imprisoned for dealing in drugs, which some insist he continues to do to this day, citing as evidence his exorbitant wealth, which is out of all proportion to the volume of the sales in his stores and the profits of his companies, indicating that his commercial activities are a mere front for money laundering.

Whatever the accuracy of these rumors, Hagg Azzam has become the unrivaled Big Man of Suleiman Basha and people seek him out to get their business done and settle their differences, while his influence has been consolidated recently by his joining the Patriotic Party and by his youngest son Hamdi subsequently joining the judiciary as a public prosecutor. Hagg Azzam has an overwhelming urge to buy property and shops in the downtown district specifically, as though to stress his new situation in the area that once witnessed him as a poor down-and-out.

It was about two years ago that Hagg Azzam woke to perform the dawn prayer, as was his custom, and found his nightwear wet. He was disturbed and it occurred to him that he might be sick, but when he went into the bathroom to wash, he ascertained that the cause of the wetness was a sexual urge and he remembered the distorted image of a naked, distant woman that he had seen in his dreams. This strange phenomenon in an old man like himself astonished him. He forgot about it during the busy day but it happened again several times thereafter, so that he had to bathe daily before the dawn prayer to cleanse himself of the defilement. Nor did things end there, for he caught himself several times stealing glances at the bodies of the women working for him in the store, and some of them, instinctively sensing his lust, started to walk with a deliberately provocative gait and talk coquettishly in front of him to seduce him, so that several times he was forced to scold them.

These sudden importunate sexual urges disturbed Hagg Azzam greatly, firstly because they were inappropriate to his age and secondly because he had kept to the straight and narrow all his life and believed that his uprightness and avoidance of anything that might make God angry was the main reason for all the success he had achieved — for he never drank alcohol. (As for the hashish that he smoked, many religious experts had assured him that it was merely “reprehensible” and neither created uncleanness nor was absolutely prohibited. In addition it neither took away the mental faculties nor drove man to commit indecencies or crimes as did alcohol; on the contrary, hashish calmed a man’s nerves, brought him greater equipoise, and sharpened his mind.) Likewise, the Hagg had never committed fornication in his entire life, immunizing himself, like most Sa’idis, by marrying early; also over the course of his long life he had witnessed wealthy men surrender to their lusts and lose vast fortunes.

The Hagg confided his problem to certain older friends of his and they assured him that what was happening was an ephemeral phenomenon that would soon disappear forever. “It’s just an excess of good health,” said his friend Hagg Kamil the cement trader, laughing. But the urges continued as the days passed and intensified until they became a heavy burden on his nerves and, even worse, were the cause of a number of tiffs with Hagga Salha, his wife, who was a few years younger than he but was caught unprepared by this sudden blossoming of youthfulness and then got upset because she was unable to satisfy him. More than once she rebuked him and told him that their children were grown men and that as two older spouses they ought to adorn themselves with an appropriate sedateness.

Nothing was left to Hagg Azzam but to take the matter to Sheikh El Samman, the celebrated man of religion and president of the Islamic Charitable Association, whom Azzam considers his spiritual leader and guide in all matters pertaining to this world and the next, to the degree that he will not reach a firm decision on any subject that concerns him in his work or his life without having recourse to him. He puts at his disposal thousands of pounds, to be spent, with his knowledge, on charitable works, not to mention the valuable gifts that he gives him every time a good business deal has gone through as a result of his prayers and blessings.

After the Friday prayer and the weekly class in religion that Sheikh El Samman delivers at the Salam Mosque in Medinet Nasr, Hagg Azzam requested a private interview with the sheikh and talked to him about his problem. The sheikh listened attentively, was silent for a while, then said with a vehemence that was not far from anger, “Glory be, Hagg! Why, my brother, make things difficult for yourself when God has made them easy for you? Why open the door for Satan, so that you can fall into error? You have to protect yourself, as God commanded. God has made marriage to more than one wife lawful for you so long as you behave with justice. Put your trust in God and make haste to do what is right before you fall into what is wrong!”

“I’m an old man. I’m afraid of what people might say if I married.”

“If I didn’t know your righteousness and God-fearingness, I would think badly of you. Which is worthier of your fear, man? What people say, or the anger of the Merciful, Glorious, and Magnificent? Would you make forbidden what God has made lawful? You are potent, your health is excellent, and you find in yourself a desire for women. Marry and treat both your wives equally. God loves you to make lawful use of what He has permitted.”

Hagg Azzam hesitated for a long while (or made a show of doing so), but Sheikh El Samman kept on at him until he convinced him. He even (and for this he was to be thanked) undertook to convince his three sons, Fawzi, Qadri, and Hamdi (the public prosecutor). The last two received the news of their father’s wish to get married with astonishment but accepted it anyway. Fawzi, the elder son and his father’s right hand at work, seemed not to approve, though he did not make his reason for objecting explicit. In the end, he said grudgingly, “If the Hagg has to marry, then it’s up to us to make sure he chooses well, so he doesn’t fall into the hands of some bitch who will make his life hell.”

The principle was established, then, and it remained to mount a search for a suitable wife. Hagg Azzam commissioned his most trusted friends to look for a nice girl and during the next few months saw many candidates but with his broad experience refused any in whose conduct he found anything to object to. This one was outstandingly lovely but had her face uncovered, was pert, and he could not entrust her with his honor; that one was young and spoiled and would exhaust him with her demands; and the one after was greedy and loved money. Thus, the Hagg refused all candidates until he met Souad Gaber, a salesclerk in the Hannaux department store in Alexandria. She was divorced and had one son, and as soon as the Hagg saw her she beguiled his heart — a light-skinned woman, full-bodied, beautiful, who covered her hair, which was black and smooth and flowing, the tresses peeking out from beneath her headscarf. The eyes were black, wide, and bewitching, the lips plump and sensual, and she was clean, and her attention to the minutiae of her body was outstanding as is usually the case with the women of Alexandria. Her finger- and toenails were clipped and the tips were cleaned, though they were not painted (so that the varnish would not form an impediment to the water she used for her ritual ablutions). Her hands were soft, tender-skinned, and rubbed with cream. Even her heels were extremely clean, smooth, firm, and free of any cracking, and were suffused with a delicate redness as a result of being polished with pumice.

Souad left a delicate, fascinating impression on the Hagg’s heart. What pleased him specially was the meekness that poverty and a hard life had left her with. He considered that her history was in no way blameworthy: she had married a house painter, who had left her a son and then abandoned her and gone off to Iraq, where nothing more was heard from him; the court had granted her a divorce so that her situation should not lead to social problems.

The Hagg sent people secretly to ask about her at her work and home, and everyone praised her for her morals. Then he performed the prayer for guidance in choice and Souad Gaber appeared to him in a dream in all her beauty (but decently dressed and not naked and vulgar like the women of whom he usually dreamed). As a result, Hagg Azzam put his trust in God and visited Souad’s family in Sidi Bishr, sat down with Rayyis Hamidu, her elder brother (who worked as a waiter in a cafe in El Manshiya), and agreed with him on everything. Hagg Azzam, who was, as usual when conducting a business transaction, clear and frank and not disposed to bargain, married Souad Gaber on the following conditions:

1. That Souad come and live with him in Cairo and leave her small son Tamir with her mother in Alexandria, it being understood that she could go and visit him “when convenient.”

2. That he should buy her jewelry to a value of ten thousand pounds as an engagement present and that he should pay a bride price of twenty thousand pounds, it being understood that the amount to be paid in the case of an eventual divorce should not exceed five thousand pounds.

3. That the marriage should remain a secret and that it be clearly understood that in the case of Hagga Salha, his wife, finding out about his new marriage, he would be compelled to divorce Souad forthwith.

4. That, while the marriage was to be conducted according to the norms set by God and His Prophet, he had no desire whatsoever for offspring.

Hagg Azzam stressed this last condition, making it extremely clear to Rayyis Hamidu that neither his age nor his circumstances permitted him to be father to a child at this time and that if Souad got pregnant, the agreement would be considered abrogated forthwith.

“What’s wrong?”

The two of them were on the bed: Souad in her blue nightgown that revealed her full, trembling breasts, her thighs, and her amazingly white arms, Hagg Azzam stretched out beside her on his back wearing his white gallabiya. This was their hour — every day after the Hagg had performed the afternoon prayer in his office and gone up to her in the luxury apartment that he had bought her on the seventh floor of the building to take his lunch, after which he would sleep with her till before the last prayer and then leave her until the following day. This was the only regime that allowed him to see her without disturbing his family life.

Today, however, he was, unlike his usual self, exhausted and anxious. He was thinking about something that had kept him distracted all day long but now he was tired of thinking and had a headache and nausea from the several hand-rolled cigarettes he had smoked after eating and he wished Souad would leave him to sleep for a little. She, however, stretched out her hands, took his head between their soft palms with their sweetly perfumed scent, looked at him for a while with her wide, black eyes, and whispered, “What’s wrong, my dear?”

The Hagg smiled and mumbled, “Lots of problems at work.”

“Praise God you’ve got your health. That’s the most important thing.”

“Praise God.”

“I swear to Almighty God, the world isn’t worth a second’s worry!”

“You’re right.”

“Tell me what’s bothering you, Hagg.”

“As though you don’t have enough problems of your own!”

“Go on with you! Are my problems more important than yours?”

The Hagg smiled and looked at her gratefully. Then he moved closer, planted a kiss on her cheek, pulled his head back a little, and said in a serious voice, “God willing, I intend to put myself forward for the People’s Assembly.”

“The People’s Assembly?”

“Yes.”

She was taken aback for a moment because it was so unexpected, but she soon pulled herself together and wreathed her face in a happy smile, saying gaily, “What a wonderful day, Hagg! Should I whoop for joy or what?”

“Let’s just hope that things go well and I get elected.”

“God willing.”

“You know, Souad, if I get into the Assembly… I can do business worth millions.”

“Of course you’ll get in. Could they find anyone better than you?”

Then she puckered up her lips as though talking down to a child and said to him (using the words one would to a little girl), “But I’m scared, sweetie, that when you appear on television and everyone sees you looking so cute, they’ll go steal you away from me!”

The Hagg burst into laughter and she moved up close so he could feel the warmth of her excited body. Then she reached over with her hand in an unhurried, practiced, long-lasting caress that finally yielded its fruits, and let out a ribald laugh when she saw that in his enthusiasm and haste, he had got his head stuck in the neck of his gallabiya.

It was just like when you watch a film — you get engrossed in it and you react to it, but in the end the lights go back on, you return to reality, you leave the cinema, and the cold air of the street, crowded with cars and passersby, strikes you on the face; everything returns to its normal size and you think of everything that happened as just a movie, just a lot of acting.

That’s how Taha el Shazli recalls the events of the day of the character interview: the long corridor of luxurious red carpet, the huge spacious room with its lofty ceiling, the large desk raised enough above floor level to make it seem like the dais in a courtroom, the low leather seat on which he sat, the three generals with their huge flabby bodies, white suits, shiny brass buttons, signs of rank, and glittering decorations on their chests and shoulders, and the presiding general, who welcomed him with a precisely measured, disciplined smile and then nodded to the committee member on his right. The latter propped his arms on the desk, stuck his bald head forward, and started asking him questions, the other two watching him closely as though weighing every word he spoke and observing every expression that appeared on his face. The questions were what he’d expected, his officer friends having assured him that the character interview questions were always the same and well known, the whole test being no more than a formality carried out for appearance’s sake, either to exclude radical elements (based on the National Security Service reports) or to confirm the acceptance of those blessed with influential friends. Taha had memorized the expected questions and their model answers and proceeded steadily and confidently to give his answers before the committee. He said that he had obtained high enough marks to qualify for one of the good colleges but preferred the Police Academy so that he could serve his country from his position as a police officer. He stressed that the job of the police was not simply to maintain order, as many thought, but social and humanitarian (giving examples of what he meant). Next he spoke about preventive security, in terms of definition and methods, approval appearing clearly on the examiners’ faces and the presiding general even nodding his head twice in confirmation of Taha’s answer. The former then spoke for the first time and asked Taha what he would do if he went to arrest a criminal and found him to be one of his childhood friends. Taha was expecting the question and had prepared the reply, but he made a show of thinking a bit to increase the impact of his answer on the examiners. Then he said, “Sir, duty knows nothing of friends or relatives. A policeman is like a soldier in battle — he must carry out his duty irrespective of all other considerations, for the sake of God and his country.”

The presiding general smiled and nodded with frank admiration and the silence that comes before the end reigned. Taha expected that the order to dismiss would be given, but the presiding general suddenly looked hard at the papers as though he had just discovered something. He raised the sheet of paper a little to make sure of what he had read, then asked Taha, avoiding his eyes, “Your father — what’s his profession, Taha?”

“Civil servant, sir.”

(This is what he had written on the application form, after paying the Community Liaison Officer a bribe of a hundred pounds to sign off on it.) The general searched through the papers again and said, “Civil servant or property guard?”

Taha said nothing for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “My father is a property guard, sir.”

The presiding general smiled and looked embarrassed. Then he bent over the papers, carefully wrote something on them, raised his head with the same smile, and said, “Thanks, son. Dismissed.”

His mother sighed and quoted the Qur’anic verse, “It may happen that you will hate a thing which is better for you .”

Busayna cried out vehemently, “What’s so special about being a police officer? Police officers are as common as dirt. How happy I would have been to see your officer’s uniform, when you were earning pennies!”

Taha had spent the day roaming the streets till he was exhausted and then come home to the roof and sat with his head bowed on the bench, the suit that he had put on that morning stripped of its glamour, baggy now and looking cheap and wretched. His mother tried to cheer him up.

“Son, you’re making things too complicated. There are lots of other good colleges apart from the police.”

Taha remained bowed and silent. It seemed it was beyond his mother’s words to deal with the matter and she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him with Busayna, who moved over to sit next to him on the bench. She drew close to him and whispered, “Please don’t upset yourself, Taha.”

Her voice set him off and he cried out bitterly, “I’m upset because of all my wasted effort. If they’d set a particular profession for the father from the start, I would have known. They should have said ‘No children of doorkeepers.’ And what they did is against the law, too. I asked a lawyer and he told me that if I brought a case against them, I’d win.”

“We don’t want a court case or anything of that sort. Know what I think? With the grades you’ve got, you should enter the best college in the university, graduate with top marks, go off to an Arab country and earn some money, then come back here and live like a king.”

Taha looked at her for a while, then hung his head again. She went on, “Look, Taha. I know I’m a year younger than you, but I’ve worked and work has taught me a few things. This country doesn’t belong to us, Taha. It belongs to the people who have money. If you’d had twenty thousand pounds and used them to bribe someone, do you think any one would have asked about your father’s job? Make money, Taha, and you’ll get everything, but if you stay poor they’ll walk all over you.”

“I can’t let them get away with it. I must make a complaint.”

Busayna laughed bitterly. “Complain about who and to who? Do as I say and no more useless ideas. Work hard, get your degree, and don’t come back here till you’re rich. And if you never come back, better still.”

“So you think I should go to one of the Arab countries?”

“Certainly.”

“Will you come with me?”

The question took her by surprise and she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, “God willing.” But he said sadly, “You’ve changed toward me, Busayna. I know it.”

Busayna could see another quarrel coming, so she said with a sigh, “You’re tired out now. Go get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

She left but he didn’t sleep. He stayed awake for a long while thinking, recalling a hundred times the face of the presiding general as he asked him slowly, as though reveling in his humiliation, “Your father’s a property guard, son?” “Property guard?” — an unfamiliar expression, one that he’d given no thought to and that he’d never expected. An expression that was his whole life. He had lived it for long years, suffered its oppression, resisted it with all his might, and tried to rid himself of it. He had struggled so that he might escape through the opening provided by the Police Academy into a respectable, decent life, but that expression — “property guard” — was waiting for him at the end of the exhausting race, to ruin everything at the final moment. Why hadn’t they told him at the beginning? Why had the general left it to the end and shown how pleased he was with his answers to the questions, then directed his final thrust at him, as much as to say to him, “Get out of my sight, you son of a doorkeeper! You want to get into the police, you son of a doorkeeper? The son of the doorkeeper wants to be an officer? That’s a good one, I swear!”

Taha started to pace the room for he had made up his mind that he had to do something. He told himself that he could not remain silent while they humiliated him in this way. Slowly, he started to imagine fantastic scenes of revenge: he saw himself, for example, delivering the generals on the committee a speech about equal opportunity, rights, and the justice that God and his Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — had bidden us to. He went on rebuking them until they melted in shame for what they had done and apologized to him and announced his acceptance into the academy. In the final scene, he saw himself grasping the presiding general’s collar and shouting in his face, “What business is it of yours what my father’s job is, you cheating bribe-taker!” Then he directed at it a number of violent blows, in response to which the general fell to the ground, drowning in his own blood. It was his habit to imagine scenes like these whenever he found himself in difficult situations that he could not control. This time, however, the scenes of revenge, for all their power, could not assuage his thirst. Feelings of humiliation continued to bear down on him, until an idea occurred to him that he could not get out of his head. Sitting down at the small desk and taking out a piece of paper and a pen, he wrote in large letters at the top of the page, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Complaint presented to His Excellency the President of the Republic.” He stopped for a moment and tipped his head back, feeling some comfort at the grandiloquence of the words and their solemnity. Then he applied himself diligently to writing.

I have left this space empty because I couldn’t think what to write in it. Words are all right to describe ordinary sorrows or joys, but the pen is incapable of describing great moments of happiness, such as those lived by Zaki el Dessouki with his sweetheart Rabab and, despite the unfortunate incident, Zaki Bey will always remember the lovely Rabab with her magical, golden-brown face, her wide, black eyes, and her full, crimson lips when she had undone her hair so that it hung down her back and sat in front of him drinking whisky and caressing him with her provocative voice, and how she excused herself to go to the bathroom and came back wearing a short nightdress, opened to reveal her charms; and he will remember that playful smile of hers as she asked him, “Where shall we sleep?” and the irresistible pleasure that her soft, warm body bestowed on him. Zaki Bey remembers every detail of that superb lovemaking and then suddenly the picture in his head becomes distorted and is violently disturbed, and finally cuts out altogether, leaving behind it a dark emptiness and a painful feeling of headache and nausea. The last thing he remembers is a low sound like the hissing of a snake, followed by a penetrating smell that stung the membranes of his nose, at which moment Rabab started examining him with a strange look as though watching for something. After that, Zaki Bey remembers nothing…

He awoke with difficulty, the hammers of an appalling headache banging on his head, and found Abaskharon standing next to him, showing signs of apprehension and whispering insistently, “Your Excellency is unwell. Shall I call a doctor?”

Zaki shook his heavy head with difficulty, making an extraordinary effort at the same time to gather his scattered thoughts. He thought he must have been asleep for a long while and wanted to know the time, so he looked at his gold wristwatch, but it wasn’t there. Nor was his wallet on the table next to him where he’d left it. At this, he knew for sure he’d been robbed and little by little started to make an inventory of what was missing: in addition to the gold watch and the five hundred pounds that were in his wallet, Zaki Bey lost a set of gold Cross pens (unused, in their case) and a pair of Persol sunglasses. The worst blow, however, was the theft of the diamond signet ring belonging to his elder sister Dawlat el Dessouki.

“I’ve been robbed, Abaskharon! Rabab robbed me!”

Zaki Bey kept repeating this as he sat almost naked on the edge of the couch that shortly before had been a cradle of love. At that moment, in his underwear and with his frail body and empty, collapsed mouth (he had removed his false teeth so as to be able to kiss the Beloved), he looked very much like some wretched comic actor, resting between scenes. Overwhelmed by misery he put his head in his hands while Abaskharon, agitated by this momentous event and excited as a locked-up dog, started to strike the ground with his crutch and pace the room in every direction. Then he bent over his master and gasped out, “Excellency, should we report the bitch to the police?”

Zaki thought a little, then shook his head and remained silent. Abaskharon came closer and whispered, “Excellency, did she give you something to drink or spray something in Your Excellency’s face?”

Zaki el Dessouki had needed that question in order to be able to articulate his anger and he flared up, raining insults on the unfortunate Abaskharon. In the end, however, he accepted his help in getting up and dressing, for he had decided to leave.

It was past midnight and the stores on Suleiman Basha had closed their doors. Zaki Bey walked with dragging steps, staggering from the effects of the headache and fatigue, an enormous fury slowly building up inside him. He thought of the efforts and the money that he had spent on Rabab and the valuable things she had stolen from him. How could all this have happened to him? Zaki Bey the distinguished, the woman charmer and lover of noblewomen, tricked and robbed by a low prostitute! Perhaps she was with her lover at this minute, giving him the Persol glasses and the gold Cross pens (unused) and laughing with him at the gullible old man who had “fallen for it.”

His ire was increased by the fact that he could not inform the police for fear of the scandal, echoes of which would inevitably reach his sister Dawlat. Likewise he could not go after Rabab or make a complaint against her at the Cairo Bar where she worked since he knew for sure that the owner of the bar and everyone who worked there were hardened criminals with previous convictions and that the robbery might even have been carried out for them. In any case there was no possibility they would support him against Rabab, and it was even on the cards that they would beat him up, as he had actually seen them do with disorderly customers.

There was nothing for it therefore but to forget the whole incident, and how difficult and painful that was — not to mention the anxiety weighing on his heart over the theft of his sister’s ring. He started blaming himself: when he had got the ring back from Papasian the jeweler’s after it was mended, why had he kept it in the office instead of hurrying to return it to Dawlat? What was he to do now? He could not afford to buy a new ring and even if he could, Dawlat knew her jewelry as she did her own children. He feared his confrontation with Dawlat more than anything else — so much so that when he arrived in front of their apartment in Baehler Passage, he stood hesitating at the entrance and it occurred to him to go and spend the night at one of his friends’ houses, and this he almost did. But it was late and his exhaustion was driving him to go upstairs, so he went.

“And just where has His Lordship been?”

These were Dawlat’s opening words to him as he stepped into the apartment. She was waiting for him in the reception room, on the seat facing the front door. She had wrapped her chestnut-dyed hair on her “boucles” and covered her lined face with thick layers of powder, while a lighted cigarette in a small gold holder dangled from the corner of her mouth. She had on a blue house robe that covered her thin body and had stuffed her feet into her “pantoufles,” which were shaped like white rabbits. She sat knitting, her hands moving in a quick, mechanical way, never stopping or slackening their pace, as though they were divorced from the rest of her body. Habit had taught her the skill of smoking, knitting, and talking simultaneously.

“Good evening.”

Zaki said the words quickly and tried to move on directly to his room, but Dawlat launched her attack immediately, screaming in his face, “What do you think you are? Living in an hotel? Three hours I’ve been waiting for you, to and fro between the door and the window. I was just going to call the police. I thought something must have happened to you. It’s too bad of you! I’m sick. Do you want to kill me? Have mercy on me, Lord! Lord, take me and let me rest!”

This was a kind of brief overture to a quarrel in four movements that might stretch out till the morning and Zaki, quickly crossing the hall, said, “I’m sorry, Dawlat. I’m extremely tired. I’m going to sleep and in the morning I’ll tell you what happened, God willing.”

Dawlat, however, was alert to his attempt at flight and, throwing the knitting needles from her hands, rushed at him screaming at the top of her voice, “Tired from what, you poor thing? From the women you spend all your time sniffing after like a dog? Wise up, mister! You could die any day. When you meet Our Lord, what are you going to tell Him then, mister?”

With the last cry, Dawlat gave Zaki a hard shove in the back. He staggered a little but rallied his forces and slipped inside his room, where despite Dawlat’s fierce resistance he managed to lock his door, stuffing the key into his pocket. Dawlat continued to shout and rattle the doorknob to make him open up, but Zaki felt that he’d made it to safety and told himself that it wouldn’t be long before she got tired and went away. Then he lay down fully clothed on the bed. He was tired and sad and he started to review the events of the day, muttering in French, “Quelle journée horrible!” Then he thought of Dawlat and asked himself how his beloved sister could have been transformed into this vicious, hateful old woman.

She is only three years older than he, and he still remembers her as a beautiful delicate girl wearing the yellow and navy school uniform of the Mere de Dieu and learning selections of La Fontaine’s animal verses by heart. In the evenings she would play the piano in the reception room of their old house in Zamalek (which the Basha had sold following the Revolution). She played so well that Mme. Chedid the music teacher approached the Basha about the possibility of her applying for the international amateurs’ competition in Paris, but the Basha refused and Dawlat soon married Airforce Captain Hassan Shawkat and had a boy and a girl (Hani and Dina). Then the Revolution came and Shawkat was pensioned off because of his close relations with the royal family and soon after died a sudden death while still less than forty-five years of age.

Dawlat remarried twice after him but had no more children — two failed marriages that left her bitter, nervy, and a cigarette smoker. Then her daughter grew up, married, and emigrated to Canada. When her son graduated from the School of Medicine, Dawlat waged a fierce battle to stop him emigrating. She wept and screamed and implored all her relatives to convince him to remain with her, but the young doctor, like most of his generation, was sick to despair of the situation in Egypt. He was determined to emigrate and offered to take his mother with him but she refused and was left on her own.

She rented out her flat in Garden City furnished and moved in to live with Zaki downtown, and from the first day the two old people had not stopped feuding and battling as though they were sworn enemies. Zaki had got used to his independence and freedom and it had become difficult for him to accept anyone else sharing his life — to accept that he would have to stick to appointed times for sleeping and eating and that he would have to tell Dawlat ahead of time if he intended to stay out late. Her presence prevented him from inviting girlfriends home, and her barefaced interference in his most private affairs and her constant attempts to dominate him made her even harder to put up with.

From her side, Dawlat endured loneliness and unhappiness and it grieved her that she should end her life without accomplishments or achievements after failing in marriage and seeing her children leave her in her old age. It provoked her greatly that Zaki seemed in no way like a failing old man waiting for death, but still wore scent and played the fop and chased women. No sooner did she catch sight of him smiling and humming in front of the mirror as he primped his clothes or notice that he was happy and in high spirits than she would feel a resentment that wouldn’t subside until she’d picked a quarrel with him and flayed him with her tongue. She attacked his childish ways and whims not from a standpoint based on any moral objections but simply because his clinging to life in this way didn’t match her own despair, her fury at him being akin to that felt by mourners at the man who guffaws in the middle of a funeral.

In addition, there lay between the two old people all the irritability, impatience, and obstinacy that go with old age, plus that certain tension that develops when two individuals live in too close proximity to one another — from one using the bathroom for a long time when the other wants it, from one seeing the sullen face the other wears when he wakes from sleeping, from one wanting silence while the other insists on talking, from the mere presence of another person who never leaves you day and night, who stares at you, who interrupts you, who picks on everything you say, and the grating of whose molars when he chews sets you on edge, and the ringing noise of whose spoon striking the dishes disturbs your quiet every time he sits down to eat with you.

Zaki Bey el Dessouki stayed stretched out on the bed going over these events and gradually drowsiness started to overcome him. However, his bad day wasn’t over yet, for it was not long before he heard, as he lay between sleeping and waking, the grating of the spare key, which Dawlat had known where to find. She opened the door, approached him, and, eyes wide with resentment and voice gasping with emotion, said, “Where’s the ring, Zaki?”

Like a victorious wartime general who enters in triumph a city he has conquered after bitter fighting, Malak Khilla appeared on the roof of the building to take possession of his new room in a happy and vainglorious mood. He was wearing his blue people’s suit that he kept for special occasions and had hung around his neck a long tape measure that was for him — like an officer’s pips or a doctor’s stethoscope — the distinguishing mark of his professional status as a master shirtmaker. That morning he brought with him a number of workmen to get the room ready — a smith, an electrician, a plumber, and some young male assistants to help them.

Master craftsman Malak muttered a prayer of thanks to the Virgin and Christ the Savior, then stretched out his hand to open the door to the room for the first time. The air inside was musty because it had been closed for a whole year following the death of Atiya the newspaper seller (some of whose effects Malak found and had one of the boys collect in a large cardboard box).

Now Malak stands in the middle of the room after opening the window and letting sunlight flood the place and issues detailed instructions to the workmen as to what they have to do. From time to time, one of the residents of the roof stops and watches what’s going on out of curiosity. Some watch for a short while, then move on. Others offer Malak their congratulations on taking possession of the new room and shake his hand, wishing him well in his enterprise.

Not all the residents of the roof, however, are so well mannered. After less than half an hour, word has spread on the roof and soon two individuals appear who do not seem to be the least bit eager to welcome the new arrival — Mr. Hamid Hawwas and Ali the Driver.

The first is a civil servant in the National Sanitation Authority whose boss got angry with him and transferred him from his hometown of El Mansoura to Cairo, so he rented a room on the roof where he lives alone, expending all his energy for more than a year now to get his arbitrary transfer cancelled and return home. Mr. Hamid Hawwas is a major writer of official complaints, and finds a genuine and all-encompassing pleasure in selecting the subject of the complaint and formulating it eloquently, then writing it out in a neat, easy-to-read hand and subsequently following it through to the end at whatever cost this may impose upon him, for he considers himself to be responsible to some degree for the proper performance of all public utilities in any area in which he may be residing, or even passing through. He always finds the time to make a daily round of the District Administration, the Governorate, and the Utilities Police, during which he pertinaciously and single-mindedly follows up on the complaints he has made against street vendors who may stand in locations far distant from his place of residence but whom, as violators of the law, he nevertheless believes it to be his duty to pursue with one complaint after another, never tiring and never despairing, until the Utilities Police finally move and arrest them and confiscate their goods — at which point Mr. Hamid watches from a distance, feeling the ease of conscience of one who has gone that extra mile to do his duty in full.

As for Ali the Driver, he’s an alcoholic, over fifty, never married, who works as a driver at the Holding Company for Pharmaceuticals, going straight from work every day to the Orabi Bar in El Tawfikiya, where he eats and sits sipping a drink until midnight. Loneliness and the cheap alcohol to which he is addicted have had their effect on him, making him gross, violent, and ever in search of a quarrel on which to expend his aggression.

Mr. Hamid Hawwas approached Malak and greeted him, then opened the conversation in an extremely refined way by saying, “About this room, my friend. Do you have a contract from the owner of the building giving you the right to use it as a commercial establishment?”

“Of course I have a contract,” answered Malak excitedly, and he pulled out of his small leather purse a copy of the contract that he had signed with Fikri Abd el Shaheed. Hamid took the piece of paper, put on his glasses, and examined it carefully. Then he handed it back to Malak, saying quietly, “The contract is invalid in this form.”

“Invalid?” repeated Malak, apprehensively.

“Of course invalid. According to the law the roof is a common resource for the residents and a common resource may not be rented out for commercial purposes.”

Malak didn’t understand and stared angrily at Mr. Hamid, who went on to say, “The Court of Cassation has issued more than one ruling on the issue and the matter is closed. The contract is invalid and you have no right to the use of the room.”

“Yes, but all of you are living on the roof, so why not me?”

“We are employing our rooms for residential purposes, and that is legal. You, however, are exploiting your room for commercial ends, and that is illegal and we cannot allow it.”

“Okay. Go complain to the owner of the place since he’s the one who gave me the contract.”

“Certainly not. The law itself forbids you to make use of the room, and we, as injured residents, are obliged to prevent you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’d better get a move on and scram or else!”

These last words were spoken by Ali the Driver in his husky voice as he looked challengingly at Malak. Laying his hand on Malak’s shoulder in a clearly threatening way, he went on, “Listen, sonny boy. This roof is for respectable folk. You can’t just turn up here in your own sweet time and open a shop, with workers and customers looking at the ladies going in and out. Got it?”

Malak, who now felt the danger of the situation, responded quickly, “My dear sir, all my workers are educated people, praise God! They’re the most polite and discreet people in the world. And the people living on the roof and their ladies have my utmost respect.”

“Listen. Forget the chitchat. Pick up your stuff and get going!”

“Dear me! What’s going on? Are you going to behave like ruffians or what?”

“That’s it, momma’s boy, we’re going to behave like ruffians.”

As Ali the Driver said this, he pulled Malak toward him by his collar and gave him a slap to announce that battle was about to commence. He conducted his quarrels with ease and proficiency as though he were carrying out simple, routine procedures or practicing a sport of which he was fond. He started with a well-placed head butt at Malak, followed by two punches to the stomach and a third, powerful and audible, that struck his nose. A thread of blood flowed down Malak’s face and he tried to resist by aiming a useless, symbolic punch at his opponent, but it missed. Then as violent blows fell on him, he started screaming in protest and chaos reigned, while the workmen, not wanting problems, quietly fled and people gathered from every direction to watch. Abaskharon appeared suddenly on the roof and started screaming and wailing for help and the fight continued until Ali the Driver succeeded in expelling Malak from the room.

Mr. Hamid Hawwas had slipped away at the beginning and called the Emergency Response Police from the telephone in the cigarette stand on the opposite side of the street and it wasn’t long before a young police officer and a number of policemen and goons took everyone involved into custody — Malak, his assistants, Abaskharon, and Ali the Driver.

Approaching the officer, Hamid Hawwas greeted him politely and said, “You’ve studied law, of course, sir. Now our friend here” — pointing to Malak — ”wants to open a commercial establishment on the roof, while the roof is a common resource that may not be exploited commercially. As you know full well, sir, this is a crime, known in legal terminology as ‘extortion of possession,’ and is punishable by imprisonment for a period of up to three years.”

“Are you a lawyer?” the officer asked Mr. Hamid, who responded confidently, “No, sir. I, sir, am Hamid Hawwas, deputy director of auditing in the National Sanitation Authority, El Mansoura Branch. Equally, I am one of the residents whose rights to the common resource of the roof have been usurped. How could the owner, my dear sir, go and rent the roof for a commercial purpose? This is a flagrant attack on the common resources of the residents. If he gets away with this, he could rent out the elevator, or the entrance to the building! Has the country gone to the dogs or what?”

Mr. Hamid Hawwas posed the last question with a theatrical flourish, looking hard at the assembled residents, who, stirred by his words, muttered in protest. Confusion appeared on the young officer’s face, and after thinking for a little he said disgustedly, “Okay, come on. Everyone to the station!”

Dr. Hassan Rasheed was a leading figure in the law in Egypt and the Arab world. Like Taha Hussein, Ali Badawi, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, and others, he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to apply what they had learned there — lock, stock, and barrel — within Egyptian academia. For people like them, “progress” and “the West” were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the great Western values — democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation’s heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved.

During his studies in Paris, Dr. Rasheed met a French woman, Jeanette, and fell in love with her. Then he brought her with him to Egypt and married her and they had their only son, Hatim. The family lived a life that was European in both form and essence. Hatim could not remember ever seeing his father pray or fast. The pipe never left his mouth, there was always French wine at his table, the most recent records from Paris resounded through the house, and French was the main language of conversation at home. In the Western manner, everything about the family’s life took place according to a set time and schedule, Dr. Rasheed even setting aside special times during each week for meeting friends and relatives and writing his personal correspondence.

The fact is that in addition to his exceptional mental capacities he possessed an astonishing appetite for uninterrupted work and was able in two decades to bring about a real blossoming of Egyptian civil law studies. With time his star rose till he assumed the deanship of the Faculty of Law at Cairo University. Then the International Law Society in Paris chose him as one of the hundred most prominent lawyers in the world.

Since Dr. Rasheed was always absorbed in his research and lecturing and because his wife Jeanette’s job as a translator at the French embassy occupied all her time, their son Hatim spent his childhood sad and lonely, to the point that in contrast to all other children he even liked school days and hated the long summer vacations, which he spent on his own with no friends to play with. And along with the painful loneliness, there were the feelings of alienation and mental confusion from which the children of mixed marriages suffer.

Little Hatim spent a lot of time with the servants, and his parents (being always busy) would often send him with one of them to the Gezira Club or the cinema. Among the many servants in the house, little Hatim was particularly fond of the steward Idris, with his flowing white caftan, broad red cummerbund and tall fez, and his tall, strong, slim body, his handsome brown face, his intelligent, bright eyes, and his beaming smile from which his gleaming, white, regular teeth shone out. It was Idris’s habit to sit with Hatim in his large room overlooking Suleiman Basha, playing with his toys with him, telling him stories about animals, singing beautiful Nubian songs to him and translating for him what they meant. Idris’s voice would tremble and the tears would glisten in his eyes when he spoke to him of his mother and his brothers and sisters and his village that they had taken him away from when he was young to go work in people’s houses. Hatim loved Idris and their relationship grew till they were spending many hours together every day, and when Idris started kissing Hatim on his face and neck and whispering, “You’re beautiful. I love you,” Hatim felt no revulsion or fear. On the contrary, the burning sensation that his friend’s breath left on his body excited him. They continued to exchange kisses until one day Idris asked him to take off his clothes. Hatim was nine at the time and felt embarrassed and confused, but in the end he gave in to the insistence of his friend. The latter was so aroused by the sight of his smooth, white body that during the encounter he sobbed with pleasure and whispered incomprehensible Nubian words. Idris, despite his lust and vigor, entered Hatim’s body gently and carefully and asked him to tell him if he felt the slightest pain. This approach was so successful that when Hatim now thinks back to that first time with Idris, the same strange, piercing sensation that he knew that day for the first time comes back to him but he cannot remember feeling any distress at all.

When Idris was finished, he turned Hatim to face him and kissed him ardently on the lips, then looked into his eyes and said, “I did that because I love you. If you love me, don’t tell anyone what happened. If you tell them, they’ll beat you and throw me out and your father may put me in prison or kill me and you’ll never see me again.”

Hatim’s relationship with Idris lasted years, until Dr. Rasheed suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage caused by overwork and his widow was obliged to get rid of many of the servants because of the expense. Idris left the house and nothing more was heard of him. His absence affected Hatim so much psychologically that that year he got a poor score in the general secondary exam. Thereafter he plunged into his tumultuous homosexual life and two years later his mother passed away.

This released him from the last constraint on his pleasures. He had inherited a solid income which along with his reasonable salary from the newspaper underwrote an opulent lifestyle. He redid the large apartment in the Yacoubian Building to liberate it from its traditional style, turning it into something closer to a Bohemian artist’s studio than the home of an established family. It was now in his power to invite lovers to share his bed for days and sometimes months at a time. Hatim had relationships with many men and left them for a variety of reasons, but his covert, sinful desire remained forever linked to Idris the steward and, as a man searches among women for the image of his first love, with whom he first became acquainted with pleasure, so Hatim sought among all other men for Idris — the rough-hewn, primitive male whom civilization had not refined, and with all the hardness, crudity, and vigor that such a man represented. He never ceased thinking about Idris and often would relive, with a delicious, burning tenderness, his feeling as he lay facedown on the floor of his room (like a little rabbit surrendering itself to its fate) following with his eyes the Persian designs drawn on the carpet as Idris’s hot, bursting body clung to his, wringing it and melting it. The strange thing was that their sexual encounters, many as they were, always ended up on the floor and they never got into the bed, a fact probably attributable to Idris’s feelings of insignificance as a servant and his psychological inability to use his master’s bed even when having sexual intercourse with him.

It had happened one night a few months ago that drunkenness got the better of Hatim and an implacable urge to have sex had swept over him. He left his apartment and wandered the downtown area. It was ten o’clock (the hour when the police privates change guard, one known to every Downtown homosexual as the hour at which they rush to meet their lovers among them) and Hatim was looking over the simple conscripts as they prepared to quit their shift when he saw Abd Rabbuh (who looked a lot like Idris). He got him into the car, gave him money, and kept fondling him until he succeeded in seducing him.

Later Abd Rabbuh made many violent attempts to put an end to his relationship with Hatim, who was well aware from his long experience in homosexual love that the active homosexual who is just starting out, such as Abd Rabbuh, is usually possessed by a terrible sense of sin that soon develops into bitterness and black hatred for the passive homosexual who seduces him. He was also aware that the homosexual experience when repeated and the savoring of its sensual pleasures turn bit by bit into genuine desire on the part of the active partner, however much he may hate it and shy away from it at the beginning. As a result, Hatim and Abduh’s relationship swung from attempts at separation to reunions.

Yesterday Abduh had left Chez Nous to escape from Hatim, but Hatim had caught up with him and insisted until he went with him to the apartment, where they had drunk a whole bottle of strong French wine together before making love — and now here was Hatim the next morning lying stretched out in the bathtub, surrendering himself to the jets of hot water spurting from the showerhead which felt to his body like armies of delicious ants, while he recalled, smiling, his passionate night with Abduh, whose body, its lust inflamed by the wine, had been wrung by numerous, successive spasms. Hatim stood up to dry himself in front of the mirror and clean his private parts with care, applying scented cream, then wrapped himself in a rose cashmere dressing gown, left the bathroom for the bedroom, and settled down to watch Abduh as he slept — his dark brown face, his thick lips, his snub Negroid nose, and the heavy eyebrows that gave his face its stern cast. He bent over him and kissed him and Abduh awoke and opened his eyes slowly.

“Good morning! Bonjour!” whispered Hatim gently, smiling at Abduh, who sat up a little and leaned against the back of the bed, revealing his broad, dark chest covered with a forest of thick hair. Hatim pursued him with kisses, but Abduh pushed his face away with his hand, then looked downward and said bitterly as though breaking into a lament, “Hatim Bey, I’m in a real mess. Any day now the officer will refer me for punishment.”

“Abduh! Do we have to start talking about the officer again? I told you not to worry. I’ve found someone who can put in a good word for you with him, a very important general in the Ministry.”

“By the time you talk to him, I’ll have been flung in prison. My wife and little boy back in the village live off what I earn, Excellency. I wish I could get out of the army right away — if I go to prison, my family will be done for.”

Hatim gazed at him tenderly and smiled. Then he got up slowly, went over to his small purse, took out a hundred-pound note, and thrust it toward him, saying, “Here. Send this to your wife and son, and if they ask for anything from me, I’ll take care of it for you. Tomorrow I’ll meet my relative the general and we’ll put in a word for you with the officer. Just please, for my sake, don’t upset yourself, Abduh.”

Abduh looked down and whispered words of thanks. Hatim moved up to him until their bodies were completely joined and said to himself in French as he approached Abduh’s thick lips, “Quelle belle journée! ”

The neighbors were used to hearing the sounds of Zaki el Dessouki and his sister Dawlat quarreling. It happened a lot and no longer aroused their surprise or curiosity. This time, however, the quarrel was different — more like a terrible explosion. Screams, ugly insults, and the loud sounds of hand-to-hand fighting reached the residents, who opened their doors and came out to reconnoiter. Some murmured nervously, preparing to intervene. Dawlat shouted in an angry voice, “You lost my diamond ring, you shit?”

“Talk decently, Dawlat!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t give it to one of your prostitute friends!”

“I’m telling you, talk decently!”

“I am still decent, in spite of you! It’s you that’s the laughingstock everyone despises! Get out of my house, you son of a bitch, you junkie!”

“This is my apartment,” shouted Zaki Bey in an exhausted voice.

“Not so, sweetheart. It’s the house of my father, the respected basha, which you have defiled with your filth!”

Sounds of slaps and a battle followed, the door of the apartment opened, and Dawlat pushed Zaki outside, shouting, “Get out! I don’t ever want to see your miserable face again!”

Zaki Bey came out and, catching sight of the throng of neighbors, turned around and said, “As you wish, Dawlat. I’m going.”

Dawlat slammed the door and the sound of the bolt was heard as she locked it. The neighbors went up to Zaki Bey and said that what had happened just now was quite inappropriate and that whatever differences there might be, it was shameful for respectable people such as Zaki Bey and his sister to fight like that. Zaki Bey nodded, smiling sadly as he withdrew, and before entering the elevator told the neighbors in a conciliatory, apologetic tone, “Sorry to have disturbed you, everyone. It’s just a misunderstanding. God willing, everything will get sorted out.”

The numerous, oft-repeated stories about the politician Kamal el Fouli assert that he grew up in an extremely poor family from Shibin el Kom, in the governorate of El Minoufiya. Despite his poverty he was extremely intelligent and ambitious, obtaining a general secondary certificate in 1955 with one of the top placements in the nation, and he plunged into politics the moment he joined the Faculty of Law. Kamal el Fouli became a member of each of the regime’s political structures in succession — the Liberation Organization and the National Union, followed by the Socialist Union and the Vanguard Organization, then the Center Platform, the Egypt Party, and, finally, the Patriotic Party. Throughout these shifts, he was always the most enthusiastic and loudest voice in support of the principles of the governing party. During Nasser’s era he gave lectures and wrote works on the necessity for and historical inevitability of the socialist transformation. And when the state switched to capitalism, he became one of the greatest supporters of privatization and the free economy, mounting from beneath the parliament dome a fierce and celebrated campaign against the public sector and totalitarian ideas in general. He was one of the few Egyptian politicians who had managed to keep a seat in parliament for more than thirty consecutive years.

While it’s true that Egyptian elections are always fixed in favor of the ruling party, it is also true that Kamal el Fouli is endowed with a real talent for politics that would necessarily have enabled him to assume the highest positions of state even in a democratic society. This same authentic talent, however, like so many talents in Egypt, has been diverted, distorted, and adulterated by lying, hypocrisy, and intrigue till the name of Kamal el Fouli has come to represent in the minds of Egyptians the ver y essence of corruption and hypocrisy.

He has risen through the party hierarchy to become secretary of the Patriotic Party and the primary arbiter of elections for the whole of Egypt, for he nominates or rejects whomever he wishes to or from the party’s list and personally supervises the fixing of elections from Alexandria to Aswan. He takes large bribes from the candidates to guarantee that the elections are fixed in their favor while at the same time covering up his corruption with all sorts of tricks, such as swapping favors and financial privileges that divert millions to leading politicians.

El Fouli also keeps secret security reports and documents proving the malfeasances of officials so that he can use them to blackmail or if need be destroy them. At political meetings, whether in the People’s Assembly or the Patriotic Party, everyone shuts up when Kamal el Fouli speaks. Indeed a single stern look from him is enough to strike terror into the heart of any official. There are numerous celebrated incidents related about him in this context in which he made mincemeat of leading officials in public because they said something that he didn’t like, an example being the ruthless campaign that he led a few years ago (on behalf of leading officials) against Dr. El Ghamrawi, governor of the Bank of Egypt, which led in the end to the latter’s resignation. A more recent example occurred last year and affected the minister of religious endowments, who enjoyed a certain popularity that made him imagine that he was powerful and influential. Under the influence of this mistaken impression, the minister got up at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Patriotic Party and made a violent attack on political corruption, demanding that party posts be cleansed of deviant elements and profiteers. Kamal el Fouli made a sign to the minister to bring his speech to a close, but the minister continued, ignoring him. At this point El Fouli interrupted him mockingly and, turning dramatically to those present, said, “Well, well! Whatever’s got into you, my dear minister? Given that Your Excellency is so concerned about fighting corruption, you might want to begin with yourself, sport. You borrowed ten million pounds from the Development Bank and for the last five years you’ve refused to pay the installments. By the way, the officials at the Bank intend to bring a case and make an example of you” — at which, the minister turned pale and sat down in silence amid the wisecracks and laughter of those present.

Hagg Azzam was well aware of all this and so as soon as he decided to put himself forward as a candidate in the elections for the People’s Assembly he sought an appointment with Kamal el Fouli, who kept him waiting for a few weeks, then finally gave him one at the office of his son, the lawyer Yasser el Fouli, on Shihab Street in El Mohandiseen. After Friday prayers, Hagg Azzam and his son Fawzi went to the appointment. The office was empty except for security staff, Kamal el Fouli, and his son. Azzam and El Fouli embraced and exchanged prayers, compliments, and jokes, and one might have been forgiven for thinking the two were old friends who loved, understood, and respected each other.

After a long conversation ranging over a number of topics by way of preparation, Azzam broached the subject. He spoke of how he loved the people and of his desire to serve them, quoting more than one of the Prophet’s noble hadiths concerning the rewards waiting for those who strive to meet the needs of the Muslims, Kamal el Fouli nodding in agreement. Finally Azzam came to the critical point. He said, “This is why I have sought God’s guidance, placed my trust in Him, and decided, God willing, to put myself forward as a candidate in the coming elections for my constituency, Kasr el Nil. I hope that the Patriotic Party will agree to nominate me and I’m yours to command, Kamal Bey, for anything you may need.”

El Fouli made a show of thinking deeply, even though he had been expecting Azzam to say this.

El Fouli made contradictory impressions on people who saw him. There were his intelligence, quick-wittedness, and overwhelming presence on the one side and on the other his corpulent body, his sagging belly, his always slightly loosened neck tie, the hideous, mismatched colors of his clothes, his crudely dyed hair, his coarse, fat face, his lying, vicious, impertinent looks, and his plebeian manner of speaking, when he would stretch his arms out in front of him, waggling his fingers and shaking his shoulders and belly as he talked, like a woman of the lower classes. All the preceding gave him a somewhat comic appearance, as though he were putting on a turn for the amusement of the bystanders. It also left one with an unpleasant feeling of vulgarity.

El Fouli asked his helpers for pen and paper. Then he started to draw and for a few moments was so absorbed in his task that Hagg Azzam thought that something was wrong. El Fouli soon finished, however, and turned the piece of paper toward Azzam, who was astonished to see that the drawing represented a large rabbit. He said nothing for a moment, then asked him in an amicable way, “I don’t understand what you mean, Your Excellency.”

El Fouli answered quickly, “You want to guarantee your success in the elections, and you’re asking what’s needed. I’ve drawn you a picture of what’s needed.”

“A whole ‘rabbit’? A million pounds, Kamal Bey? That’s a huge amount!”

Azzam had been expecting the amount but preferred to bargain, just in case. El Fouli said, “Listen, Hagg, as God is my witness…

(Here all present repeated, “There is no god but God.”)

“… in constituencies smaller than Kasr el Nil I take a million and a half, two million, and my son Yasser is standing here in front of you and he can tell you. But I love you, I swear to God, Hagg, and I really want you with us in the Assembly. Plus, I don’t take all that for myself. I’m just the postman — I take from you and deliver to others, and a nod’s as good as a wink.”

Hagg Azzam put on a show of uneasiness for a moment, then asked, “You mean, if I pay that sum, Kamal Bey, I’ll be sure of winning the elections, God willing?”

“Shame on you, Hagg! You’re talking to Kamal el Fouli! Thirty years’ experience in parliament! There’s not a candidate in Egypt can win without our say-so, God willing!”

“I hear there are some big fish intending to nominate themselves for Kasr el Nil.”

“Don’t worry about it. If we come to an understanding, God willing, you’ll win in Kasr el Nil even if the devil himself stands against you. Just leave it to me, Hagg.”

El Fouli then laughed and leaning back and rubbing his big belly said complacently, “People are naive when they get the idea that we fix elections. Nothing of the kind. It just comes down to the fact that we’ve studied the Egyptian people well. Our Lord created the Egyptians to accept government authority. No Egyptian can go against his government. Some peoples are excitable and rebellious by nature, but the Egyptian keeps his head down his whole life long so he can eat. It says so in the history books. The Egyptians are the easiest people in the world to rule. The moment you take power, they submit to you and grovel to you and you can do what you want with them. Any party in Egypt, when it makes elections and is in power, is bound to win, because the Egyptian is bound to support the government. It’s just the way God made him.”

Azzam pretended to be confused and unconvinced by El Fouli’s words. Then he asked him about the payment details and the other said simply, “Listen up, Hagg. If it’s in cash, I’ll take it. If it’s a check, make it out to ‘Yasser el Fouli, Lawyer’ and make a contract with him for any case, as though you were hiring him for it. You understand, of course, that these are mere formalities.”

Hagg Azzam was silent for a moment. Then he took out his checkbook and said as he undid his gold pen, “Fine. Let’s do it. I’ll write a check for half. Then when I win, God willing, I’ll pay the rest.”

“No way, sugar! Shame on you — you’ll get me upset if you go on like that. Keep that kind of stuff for school kids. The way I do things is pay first, take later. Pay the whole amount and I’ll congratulate you on getting into the Assembly and read the Fatiha with you right now!”

It had been Azzam’s last ploy, and when it failed, he surrendered. He wrote out the check for a million pounds, examined it carefully as was his custom, and then handed it to El Fouli, who took it and gave it to his son. Then El Fouli grinned all over his face and said gaily, “Congratulations, Hagg! Come on, let’s read the Fatiha. May the Lord be generous to us and grant us success! You’ll find the contract ready with Yasser.”

The four of them — El Fouli, Azzam, and their two sons — closed their eyes, held their hands before their breasts in supplication, and set to reciting the Fatiha under their breath.

Hagg Azzam paid the money to El Fouli and imagined the elections had been decided in his favor, but that was not the case. There was fierce competition in the Kasr el Nil constituency among a number of businessmen, each of whom wanted to win the Workers’ seat in the People’s Assembly. Hagg Azzam’s strongest competitor was Hagg Abu Himeida, owner of the famous Approval and Light clothing store chain. Just as the two poles repel one another in nature, so the sharp dislike between the two Haggs derived in essence from their many points of similiarity. Thus Abu Himeida, like Azzam, had originally been a simple laborer in Port Said. Then in less than twenty years his wealth increased vastly till he became one of Egypt’s millionaires.

People had heard about Abu Himeida for the first time some years before when he opened a chain of large shops in Cairo and Alexandria. He had flooded the newspapers and television with advertisements undertaking to give any woman a number of new, “modest” dresses and colored headscarves if the same woman would take the decision to observe religiously sanctioned dress and agreed to hand in her old, revealing clothes to the store management as a sign of her seriousness. At the time people were amazed at this strange offer and their astonishment grew when the Approval and Light stores did in fact receive the old clothes of dozens of women, to whom it handed over new and expensive Islamic garments as free replacements. The project’s noble objectives did not prevent the infiltration of certain women who already wore “modest dress” but who wanted to take advantage of the free clothes. These would pretend that they had not worn modest dress before and present the store with revealing garments that did not belong to them so that they could receive new ones in return. The Approval and Light stores caught on to this ruse and published announcements everywhere warning these tricksters of the punishment they faced in law, as the contract that the woman signed in the store included a penalty clause if she lied.

Despite these setbacks, the project achieved enormous success and helped thousands of Muslim women to adopt modest dress. Paid advertisements in the form of journalistic reports about the project appeared in the press where Hagg Abu Himeida went on record as saying that he’d sworn to set aside a large sum of money to be spent on charitable works in the hope of winning the favor of God, Almighty and Glorious, and that following consultation with qualified men of religion he’d discovered that the best method by which he might serve the call was to help Muslim women to observe modesty, as a first step toward a total commitment to God’s true path. When he was asked how much the distribution for free of thousands of new modest garments had cost him, Abu Himeida refused to say how much he had spent, asserting that he anticipated that God, Almighty and Glorious, would compensate him for the money; and there can be no doubt that the “modest dress” project catapulted Abu Himeida’s name into the world of celebrity and turned him into one of Egyptian society’s leading figures. Despite this, rumors constantly circulated that Abu Himeida was one of Egypt’s biggest heroin dealers, that the Islamic project was a money-laundering front, and that the bribes he paid to top officials protected him from arrest.

Abu Himeida had expended enormous effort to get the Patriotic Party nomination for the Kasr el Nil constituency, and when the party nominated Hagg Azzam, he was furious and made strenuous representations to important people, but in vain. El Fouli’s word was supreme. In fact, a high official who was a strong friend of Abu Himeida’s listened to him complaining against El Fouli, then smiled and said, “Listen, Abu Himeida. You know that I love you and look out for your interests. Under no circumstances escalate your differences with El Fouli. If you don’t get into the People’s Assembly this time, there’ll be other times, God willing. But you don’t ever lose El Fouli because he has backers and contacts beyond anything you can think of. Plus, he’s cunning, and if he gets mad, he’ll cause you problems you can’t even imagine.”

Abu Himeida wouldn’t, however, back down. On the contrary, he put himself forward officially as an independent, flooding the Kasr el Nil constituency with hundreds of election posters bearing his name, his portrait, and his election symbol (the chair). He also erected large election marquees every night in the downtown area where his supporters would gather and he would make speeches to them attacking Hagg Azzam and hinting at the illicit sources of his wealth and his dedication to the pleasures of the senses (an allusion to his new wife). Azzam got angry at this smear campaign, went to El Fouli, and told him frankly, “What’s the benefit of being the party’s candidate, if it doesn’t protect me from being insulted every night in public?”

El Fouli shook his head and promised that everything would be all right, then the next day put out a statement that was prominently displayed on the front pages of all the newspapers, in which he said, “The Patriotic Party has one candidate in every constituency and it is the duty of all party members to stand with all their strength behind the party’s candidate. By the same token any member of the party who puts himself up against the party’s candidate will be tried by the party and stripped of his membership once the elections are over.”

The statement clearly applied to Abu Himeida, who, however, was unfazed by the threat and continued his violent campaign against Azzam, the marquees being set up now every day while hundreds of gifts were distributed to constituents. The two sides competed at collecting followers and supporters by any means possible, and violent fights broke out daily, leading to many injuries. In view of the great influence that both the opponents enjoyed, the security forces always adopted a neutral stance. Thus, the police would usually arrive at the site of the fight after it had broken up, or make symbolic arrests of some of those involved, who no sooner reached the police station than they were released without interrogation.

For some reason, the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences of Cairo University is associated in people’s minds with affluence and chic. Its students, if asked which faculty they are in, are accustomed to reply, “Economics and Political Science” in a complacent, confident, and nonchalant way (as though saying, “Yes indeed. We are, as you can see, the tops.”). No one knows the reasons behind this mystique that surrounds the faculty. It may be because it was created separately, many years after the other faculties, that it acquired a special cachet, or because the government established it specifically — or so they say — so that the daughter of the Leader, Gamal Abd el Nasser, could go to it, or because the political sciences put those who study them in close daily contact with world events, which lends a certain stamp to their way of thinking and behaving, or finally perhaps because this faculty was for a long time the royal gateway to a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the children of the great would join it as a sure first step to a diplomatic career.

Despite all of this, no such ideas were in Taha el Shazli’s mind when he stuck the Faculty of Economics sticker onto his placement application as his first choice. His hope for a place in the Police Academy was gone forever, and he wanted to exploit his high marks to the maximum; that was all there was to it.

On the first day of studies, when he passed beneath the university clock and listened to its celebrated chimes, he was seized by that certain sense of awe and majesty, and when he entered the lecture hall filled with the reverberating buzz given off by the chatter and mingled laughter of hundreds of students as they began getting to know one another and swap merry small talk, Taha felt that he was something extremely small in the midst of a terrible congregation that resembled nothing so much as a mythical animal with a thousand heads whose eyes were all looking at, and examining, him. He found himself climbing up to sit far away at the highest point in the lecture hall, as though hiding himself in a safe place from which he could see everyone without their seeing him.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and had continued to believe as he left the house that he looked smart. But when he saw his student colleagues, he discovered that his clothes were not at all what was called for and that the jeans in particular were nothing but a cheap, second-rate imitation of the original. He made up his mind to persuade his father to buy even just one outfit from El Mohandiseen or Zamalek instead of the Approval and Light store from which he bought his cheap clothes.

Taha decided that he would not get to know anyone because getting to know people meant exchanging personal details and he might be standing in the midst of a group of his colleagues (including girls, maybe) and one of them would ask him what his father did. What would he say then? Next he was overcome by a strange feeling that one of the students sitting in the hall was the son of one of the residents of the Yacoubian Building and Taha might have bought him a pack of cigarettes once or washed his car, and he started to think what would happen if the unknown resident’s son found that the son of the doorkeeper was a colleague of his in the same faculty.

He kept thinking like this as the lectures went by one after the other until the call to the noon prayer rang out and a number of the students rose to pray. Taha followed these to the Faculty’s mosque and noticed with relief that like him they were poor, most of them being apparently of rural origin. This encouraged him to ask one of them when the prayer was over, “Are you first year?”

He replied with a friendly smile, “God willing.”

“What’s your name?”

“Khalid Abd el Rahim, from Asyut. What’s yours?”

“Taha el Shazli, from here in Cairo.”

This was the first acquaintance Taha made and in fact from the first moment, just as oil separates from water and forms a distinct layer on top, so the rich students separated themselves from the poor and made up numerous closed coteries formed of graduates from foreign language schools and those with their own cars, foreign clothes, and imported cigarettes. It was to these that the most beautiful and best-dressed girls gravitated. The poor students, on the other hand, clung to one another like terrified mice, whispering to one another in an embarrassed way.

In less than a month, Taha had become friends with the whole mosque group. Khalid Abd el Rahim, however, with his short stature, his body that was as dry and thin as a piece of sugarcane, his deep brown complexion, and his glasses with the black frames that lent his face a serious, self-possessed cast, so that, in his modest, classic clothes he looked much like a recently graduated teacher in a state school, remained the one for whom he felt the greatest affection. Taha’s affection for him may have been due to the fact that he was as poor as or even poorer than he was (as witnessed by the darns in his socks, which always showed during prayer). He was also fond of him because he was deeply religious and when praying would stand and invoke God’s presence in the full meaning of the words, placing his folded hands over his heart and bowing his head in total submission so that anyone who saw him at that moment might have imagined that if a fire broke out or shots were fired next to him, these would not distract him from his prayer for an instant. How Taha wished he could attain the same faith and love for Islam as Khalid! Their friendship grew stronger and they spoke to each other frankly and confided in each other, sharing the same distaste at the daily displays of frivolity they saw on the part of some of their affluent male colleagues and at their abandonment of the True Religion, as well as at the shamelessness of some of their female colleagues, who would come to the university dressed as though for a dance party.

Khalid introduced his friend Taha to others from the university dormitories — all country boys, good-hearted, pious, and poor — and Taha started to visit them every Thursday evening to pray the final evening prayer and stay up with them chatting and discussing. Indeed, he benefited greatly from these discussions, for he learned for the first time that Egyptian society was at the same stage that had prevailed before Islam and it was not an Islamic society because the ruler stood in the way of the application of God’s Law, while God’s prohibitions were openly flouted and the law of the state permitted alcohol, fornication, and usury. He learned too the meaning of communism, which was against religion, and of the crimes committed by the Abd el Nasser regime against the Muslim Brothers, and he read with them books by Abu el Aala el Mawdudi, Sayed Kutb, Yusef el Karadawi, and Abu Hamid el Ghazali. After several weeks, the day came when following an enjoyable evening with his friends from the dorms, they stood up to bid him farewell as usual and at the door Khalid Abd el Rahim said to him suddenly, “Where do you do your Friday prayer, Taha?”

“At a small mosque near the house.”

Khalid and his brethren exchanged a look and Khalid then said gaily, “Listen, Taha. I’ve decided to use you to get myself some reward in Heaven. Wait for me tomorrow at ten in Tahrir Square in front of the Ali Baba cafe. We’ll pray together at the Anas ibn Malik Mosque and I’ll introduce you to Sheikh Shakir, God willing.”

Two hours before the Friday call to prayer, the mosque of Anas ibn Malik filled to capacity with worshippers. They were all Islamist students, some wearing Western clothes but most in Pakistani dress — a white or blue gallabiya that reached to just below the knees with trousers of the same color beneath it and on their heads a white turban whose tail dangled at the back of the neck. These were all devotees and followers of Sheikh Muhammad Shakir and they came to the mosque early on Fridays to reserve their places before the crowd came and pass the time making acquaintances, reciting the Qur’an, and engaging in religious discussions. Their numbers grew until the place became too small to hold them all and the mosque officials brought out dozens of mats and spread them in the square opposite the mosque. This too filled to capacity with worshippers so that the traffic was brought to a standstill; even the enclosed balcony of the mosque, which was reserved for female students, despite being hidden from sight was the source of a loud murmuring that indicated that it was filled to overflowing as well.

Someone turned on the mosque’s loudspeaker and it emitted a loud squeal; then the sound cleared and one of the students started to chant the Qur’an in a sweet, submissive voice, the students listening to him with rapt attention. The atmosphere was fabulous, authentic, and pure, the ascetic, homespun, primitive scene bringing to mind the first days of Islam. Suddenly, shouts of “There is no god but God” and “God is most great” rang out and the students, rising, crowded one another to shake the hand of Sheikh Shakir, who had finally arrived. He was about fifty and stocky, with a sparse beard dyed with henna, a face not without certain good looks, and wide, impressive, honey-colored eyes. He was dressed in the Islamist fashion like the students, with a black shawl over his robes. He knew most of the students crowding around him, and shook their hands and embraced them, asking them how they were. It took a long time for him to mount the pulpit and take from his pocket a siwak, with which he purified and sweetened his teeth. Then he said, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and the cries of “God is most great” redoubled in strength until the walls of the mosque shook. The sheikh made a gesture with his hand and immediately complete silence reigned.

Starting his sermon with praise and thanks to God, he continued, “Beloved sons and daughters, I want every one of you to ask himself this question: ‘How many years does a man live on this earth?’ The answer is that the average lifespan, at the best estimate, does not exceed seventy years. This, when we come to think about it, is a very short time indeed. Moreover, a man may be afflicted at any moment with a disease or by an accident and die. If you ask among your acquaintances and friends, you will find more than one who has died suddenly while young, and it would never have occurred to any of those who died young that they would die. Pursuing this line of thinking, we find that Man has two choices before him, no more. He may focus all his efforts on his life in this fleeting, brief world that may come to an unexpected end at any moment, in which case he is like the man who wants to build himself a luxurious, elegant house but makes it of sand, on the seashore, so that the house is exposed to the possibility that at any moment a wave may come and knock it down; this is the choice that is doomed to failure. As for the second choice, that to which our Lord, Almighty and Glorious, calls us, it requires that the Muslim live in this world from the perspective that it is a brief and passing stage in the life of the immortal soul. One who lives their life in this way will gain both this world and the next and be always happy, content in mind and conscience, and courageous, fearing none but our Lord, Almighty and Glorious. The true believer has no fear of death because he does not consider it the end of existence, as the materialists believe it to be. Death for the believer is the transition of the soul from the ephemeral body to everlasting life. It was this sincere faith that allowed a few thousand of the first Muslims to be victorious over the armies of the great empires of that time, such as Persia and Byzantium. Those simple Muslims were successful in raising the banner of Islam in every part of the world through the strength of their faith, their true love for death in God’s cause, and their deep contempt for the evanescent pleasures of this world. God has made it incumbent upon us to struggle to raise high His word. Gihad is a pillar of Islam, exactly like prayer and fasting. Indeed, gihad is the most important of those pillars but the corrupt rulers dedicated to the pursuit of money and the pleasures of the flesh who have ruled the Islamic world in times of decadence have attempted, with the help of their hypocritical men of religion, to exclude gihad from the pillars of Islam, knowing that if the people cleaved fast to gihad, it would in the end be turned against them and cost them their thrones. In this way, by eliminating gihad, Islam was robbed of its real meaning and our great religion was transformed into a collection of meaningless rituals that the Muslims performed like athletic exercises, mere physical movements without spiritual significance. When the Muslims abandoned gihad, they became slaves to this world, clinging to it, shy of death, cowards. Thus their enemies prevailed over them and God condemned them to defeat, backwardness, and poverty, because they had broken their trust with Him, the Almighty and Glorious.

“Beloved sons and daughters, our rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy. God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their thrones forever. They lie and lie and lie, and they want us to believe their revolting lies. We say to them, loud and clear, ‘We do not want our Islamic Nation to be either socialist or democratic. We want it Islamic-Islamic, and we will struggle and give up our lives and all we hold dear till Egypt is Islamic once more.’ Islam and democracy are opposites and can never meet. How can water meet with fire, or light with darkness? Democracy means people ruling themselves by themselves. Islam knows only God’s rule. They want to submit God’s Law to the People’s Assembly so that the honorable representatives may decide whether God’s Law is worthy of application or not! A monstrous word it is, issuing from their mouths; they say nothing but a lie. The Law of the Truth, Glorious and Sublime, is not to be discussed or scrutinized; it is to be obeyed and implemented immediately, by force, unhappy as that may make some people. Come, my children, let us prepare our hearts to receive God’s presence, and while we are in this blessed congregation of ours, let us contract with Him, Great and Glorious, to be faithful to Him in our religion, struggle for His cause with every atom of our beings, give our lives gladly until it is God’s word that is supreme… ”

Shouts and cries of “God is most great!” arose, shaking the place to its foundations, and the sheikh stopped speaking and bowed his head for a short while till silence had returned. Then he resumed, “My children, the task before Muslim youth today is to reclaim the concept of gihad and bring it back to the minds and hearts of the Muslims. It is precisely this that terrifies America and Israel and with them our traitorous rulers. They tremble in fear at the great Islamic Awakening that gains greater momentum and whose power becomes more exigent in our country day by day. A handful of warriors from Hizbollah and Hamas were able to defeat Almighty America and Invincible Israel, while Abd el Nasser’s huge armies were routed because they fought for this world and forgot their religion.”

The sheikh’s enthusiasm now reached its climax, and he shouted, “Gihad! Gihad! Gihad! Children of Abu Bakr and Umar, Khalid, and Saad! The hopes of Islam today are pinned on you as once they were on your mighty forefathers! Struggle then for God’s cause and divorce yourselves once and for all from this world as did the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, may God be pleased with him! God looks to you to implement His covenant with you, so stand firm and retreat not, lest you be among those who lose all! Millions of Muslims humiliated and subjected to dishonor by the Zionist occupation appeal to you to restore for them their ruined self-respect. Youth of Islam, the Zionists get drunk and commit fornication with whores in the forecourt of your el Aqsa Mosque! What then will you do?”

The students’ excitement intensified and one of their number arose from the front row, turned toward the congregation, and shouted in a voice breaking with excess of emotion, “Islamic! Islamic! Not socialist and not democratic!” and the cry was taken up by hundreds of throats behind him and all the students started chanting the paean to gihad with one powerful, thunderous voice while joyful ululations rang out from the area reserved for the female students. The voice of Sheikh Shakir rose again, his excitement mounting to a new peak, “By God, I see that this place is pure and blessed, the angels surrounding it! By God, I see that the Islamic state lies in your hands and that it has been reborn mighty and proud! Our time-serving, traitorous rulers, servants of the Crusader West, will meet their just fates at your pure hands, cleansed for prayer, if God so wills!”

Then the prayer commenced and with the hundreds of students congregated behind him he recited in a sweet, affecting voice from the chapter of the House of Imran,

Following the prayer, the students pushed forward to shake the sheikh’s hand. Then they spread themselves out over the courtyard of the mosque in groups of four, introducing themselves to one another, chanting from and helping one another with their study of the Qur’an. Behind the pulpit Sheikh Shakir made his way through a small, low door to his office, which was filled to capacity with students who wanted to meet with him for various reasons. Those present pushed forward toward him and embraced him and some of them made to kiss his hand, which, however, he would pull firmly away. He sat and listened with interest to each student’s issue, then a whispered conversation would take place between them after which the student would leave.

By the end, only a few students were left in the room, among them Khalid Abd el Rahim and Taha el Shazli. The students who remained were those who were particularly close to the sheikh, and at a signal from the latter, one of them rose and bolted the door. The conversation was opened by a huge student with a long beard, who said to the sheikh in a loud, excited voice, “Master, I’m not looking for a quarrel with the security forces. They are the ones who attacked us. They seized our colleagues from their homes and put them in detention even though they’d done nothing. All I’m asking for is some kind of protest. A sit-in or a demonstration for the release of our brothers in detention.”

Khalid whispered to Taha, pointing to the huge student, “Brother Tahir, the Emir of the Gamaa for the whole of the University of Cairo. He’s a final-year medical student.”

The sheikh listened to the young man, thought for a little, and said quietly, a smile never leaving his lips, “There’s nothing to be gained by provoking the security forces against us at this time. The regime has got itself involved in the coalition with the Americans and the Zionists in the name of liberating Kuwait. In a few days an unjust, infidel war will commence in which Egyptian Muslims will kill their Iraqi brothers under America’s leadership. When this happens, the people will turn against the government in Egypt, with the Islamic movement at their head, God willing. I think you understand now, my boy. National Security is goading us in the hope that we’ll respond and provide them with a pretext to direct a comprehensive blow at the Islamists. Didn’t you notice how in today’s sermon I contented myself with a general discourse and didn’t mention the coming war openly? If I’d attacked Egypt’s membership in the coalition, they would close the mosque tomorrow, while I need the mosque to rally the young people when the war starts. No, my boy, it wouldn’t be wise to put ourselves at their mercy now. Leave them be until they kill our Muslim brothers in Iraq and you’ll see what we shall do on that day, God willing.”

“Who says that they’ll leave us alone until the war starts? What makes you so sure? Today they detained dozens of cadres of the Islamic movement and tomorrow they’ll detain the rest, if we don’t resist them,” replied the young man vehemently.

Silence reigned and the atmosphere grew tense. The sheikh shot the young man a reproving look and said in the same calm voice, “I pray God that one day you may rid yourself of this excitable nature of yours, my boy. The strong Muslim is he who controls himself when angry, as the Beloved Prophet — God’s blessings and peace upon him — has taught us. I know that it is your love for your brethren and your zeal in defense of religion that drive you to this anger, and I assure you, my boy, and I swear to you by Him who is Sublime and All-Powerful, that we shall strike this infidel regime in battle, but at the right time, God willing.”

The sheikh fell silent for a moment, then looked at the young man for a while and added in a tone that brooked no reply, “This is my last word. I will do my best, God willing, to bring about the release of those detained; we have friends, praise God, everywhere. But I will not agree to a sit-in or demonstration at this stage.”

The young man hung his head, giving the impression that he had conceded only grudgingly, and it was not long before he asked permission to leave. He shook hands with those present, and when he came to the sheikh, he bent over him and kissed his brow twice, as though to erase any trace of the tiff. The sheikh responded with a kindly smile and patted him on the shoulder affectionately. After this, the students departed one after another until only Taha and Khalid were left. Khalid approached the sheikh and said, “Master. This is Brother Taha el Shazli, my colleague at the Faculty of Economics that I told you about.”

The sheikh turned to Taha welcomingly and said, “Welcome, welcome. How are you, my boy? I’ve heard a lot about you from your friend Khalid.”

At the police station, the battle heated up.

Hamid Hawwas accused Malak Khilla in an official report of usurping occupancy of the room and demanded that the matter be referred to court, while for his part Malak affixed to the report a copy of the rental contract for the room and insisted on making a second report in which he accused Hamid Hawwas and Ali the Driver of physically assaulting him and requested that his injuries be officially noted. As a result, they sent him with a policeman to the Ahmad Mahir Hospital, from which he returned with a medical report. This too was affixed to the report, Ali the Driver denying absolutely that he had assaulted Malak and accusing him of faking his injuries.

So much for the legal cut and thrust. As for the psychological war, each plunged in after his own fashion. Hamid Hawwas, for instance, never for a second stopped presenting legal arguments relating to the common resource of the residents of the roof, citing among other things various Court of Cassation rulings, while Abaskharon pleaded with the officer (after pulling up his gallabiya as was his custom in times of disaster to show off his amputated leg) with loud repeated wailing cries of, “Mercy, Your Honor, mercy! We just want to make a living, and they throw us out and beat us up!”

Malak’s own performance in police stations was unique. He had worked out long ago that police officers evaluated a citizen on the basis of three factors — his appearance, his occupation, and the way he spoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station would either be treated with respect or despised and beaten. Given that Malak’s modest people’s suit could not be expected to leave any special impression on the officers and, equally, that his occupation of shirtmaker would not guarantee him sufficient respect, all that remained was how he spoke. As a result, Malak had become accustomed when for any reason he entered a police station to adopt the manner of a businessman preoccupied with urgent and serious affairs who was extremely perturbed at being detained in this fashion and would speak to the officers in a language approaching the classical tongue that would make them hesitate before underestimating him. He would say any old thing and then shout in the officers’ faces to stress the point, “You, sir, are apprised of this and I am apprised of this! The honorable station chief is apprised of this! The esteemed District Chief of Police is likewise apprised of this!”

The use of the classical plus the mention of the district chief of police (as though he were an intimate acquaintance whom he intended to contact) were effective ways of making the officers grudgingly draw back from treating Malak with contempt.

So there they all were — Abaskharon and Malak and Hamid Hawwas standing in front of the officer and yelling without let-up, while behind them the drunkard Ali the Driver, like an old hand on the bass who knows how to make his contribution to the music, kept repeating in his deep, husky voice, over and over again, the same words: “Sir, there are women and families on the roof! We can’t have apprentices violating the sanctity of our families, sir!”

The officer had become completely fed up with them and, were it not for his fear of the consequences, would have told the goons to hitch them all to the bastinado and beat them. In the end, however, he endorsed the report for referral to the public prosecutor and the contestants stayed in the detention room till the following morning, when the public prosecutor issued an order permitting Malak to have the use of the room “and the injured parties to have recourse to the courts.” Thus, Malak returned victorious to the roof, men of goodwill subsequently intervening and reconciling him with his opponents Ali the Driver and Hamid Hawwas (who made a show of accepting the reconciliation but never stopped writing — and conscientiously pursuing — complaints against him).

The prosecutor’s order was, however, a springboard for Malak, who in one week transformed the appearance of the room. He closed the door that opened onto the roof and opened a large door onto the main stairwell, where he hung a large plastic sign on which he wrote in Arabic and English Malak Shirts. Inside he placed a large cutting table and some chairs for waiting customers and on the wall he hung a picture of the Virgin Mary along with a copy of an article in English from the New York Times with the headline “Malak Khilla, Superb Egyptian Tailor,” in which the American journalist spoke for a whole page about the skill of Master Craftsman Malak Khilla; in the middle was a large picture of Malak with the tape measure around his neck completely absorbed in cutting a piece of cloth and apparently unaware that he was being photographed.

If anyone asks him about the article, Malak tells them that a foreigner (who later turned out to be the Cairo correspondent of the New York Times) came one day to have some shirts made and that Malak had been astonished to find him returning the following day with foreign photographers and they had written this piece about him because they were so amazed at his tailoring skill. Malak tells this story in an ordinary way, then steals a look at his listeners. If he finds them fidgety and dubious, he moves on to talk of something else as though he’d said nothing. If they appear to believe him, however, Malak will continue, emphasizing that the foreigner had insisted vehemently that he should go with him to America to work there as a shirtmaker at any salary he cared to name but that he, of course, had refused the offer because he hated the idea of living away from Egypt. Malak brings his set piece to an end by saying complacently and confidently, “Everyone knows that all those foreign countries are sniffing around for clever shirtmakers.”

The truth of the matter is that Basyouni, the photographer in Ataba Square, can run anyone up a newspaper piece talking of his skill for any newspaper on demand — ten pounds for Arabic and twenty for foreign. It takes Basyouni no more than the name of the newspaper and a picture of the client plus a ready-made article that he has in which the writer speaks of his great surprise at coming across in the streets of Cairo the workshop of the brilliant tailor so and so, or the establishment of the great kebab cook so and so. All of these Basyouni puts together in a certain way in the photocopier so as to make the copy come out looking as though it has been taken from the newspaper.

But what does Malak do in his new place? He makes shirts, of course; but tailoring doesn’t account for more than a small part of his daily activities because, in short, he works at anything that might yield a profit, from trading in currency and smuggled liquor to brokering real estate, land, and furnished apartments, to arranging the marriage of elderly Arabs to young peasant girls whom he brings in from certain villages in Giza and Fayoum, to sending workers to the Gulf against two months’ wages.

This multifaceted enterprise has made him avid for any information he can get about people and for knowledge of their most minute secrets, since anyone is a potential candidate to have dealings with him at any moment, and a little bit of information may help him at any given instant and have a decisive impact on those dealings, allowing him to sew things up the way he wants. Every day from mid-morning to ten at night, every type of humanity makes its way to Malak’s workplace — poor customers and rich, elderly Arabs, brokers, maids and girls for the furnished apartments, and small traders and commission agents; and in the midst of all these Malak comes and goes, talking and shouting, laughing and wheedling, losing his temper and quarreling, swearing a hundred false oaths and making deals, like a well-known and illustrious actor performing with relish his role in a play he has rehearsed so long he has perfected it.

Malak used to see Busayna el Sayed twice a day, on her way to and from work. She had stirred his interest from the beginning because she was beautiful and her body arousing. At the same time another feeling that was difficult to put into words made him certain that the serious expression that she wore on her face was fragile and false and that she was not as virtuous as she tried to appear. When he had collected some information about her and knew everything that was going on, he started greeting her and asking her about the health of her mother the Hagga and whether the Shanan clothing store in which she worked was in need of a consignment of shirts (for which she would of course get her commission), and gradually he started talking to her about a variety of subjects — the weather, the neighbors, marriage. Busayna herself was both ill at ease with Malak and at the same time unable to keep him at a distance since she passed him every day and he was their neighbor and spoke to her politely, thus denying her the opportunity of rounding on him. All the same, she submitted to conversing with him at base because something searching and probing in his behavior toward her made her submit. No matter what topic he might be speaking to her about, the tone of his voice and his looks would get to her, as though he were saying, “Don’t come on so self-righteous. I’ve found out everything.” This unspoken message became so clear and strong that she started asking herself whether Talal could have revealed the secret of their relationship.

Malak got more and more familiar with her until one day he suddenly directed a slow, appraising look at her full bosom and luscious body and then asked brazenly, “How much does Talal Shanan pay you a month?”

Suddenly she felt furious and decided that this time she would put him in his place very firmly, but in the end she found herself answering, avoiding his eyes, “Two hundred and fifty pounds.”

Her voice came out with a strange-sounding rattle as though someone else were speaking and Malak laughed, came close to her, and said, advancing his attack, “You’re a stupid girl. That’s pennies. Listen, I can get you work for six hundred pounds a month. Don’t say anything now. Take your time to think about it — a day, two days, then come and see me.”