That Smell and Notes From Prison (4 page)

So what if they had met before getting married. . . . She was
twenty-seven, she’d waited for her prince a long time with no luck. . . . She
had no privacy at home, she slept in a room that was like a living room. She
could never close the door and be alone and take off her clothes, for example.
She couldn’t look at her body in a mirror. She couldn’t stand the meaningful
looks of her father and her mother every night. There was nothing to talk about
except the husband that kept not coming. She was blamed for not being able to
catch one herself. Then one night she met him at a girlfriend’s house. The next
day her friend told her that he wanted to marry her and after a ten-minute walk
home, at the door to that house with its peeling paint, she said to her friend,
Why not? Maybe he was the lover she was waiting for. Maybe all this talk about
love and making eyes at each other and heaving sighs was only for books. Maybe
she had found happiness with him. Maybe. . . . The word that hangs over every
new marriage. Maybe he was the man she was waiting for. Maybe this was love. One
year later the child came and now she was stuck forever. There was nothing to do
but submit. . . . And that time when the radio was playing, when I noticed her
eyes go thoughtful and her face become full of sadness. . . . What happened
after the marriage? I imagined them next to each other on the bed, one of them
bored and resentful, always feeling that something inside her was unmoved, that
her flesh no longer quivered, that some deep well went unplumbed.

Do you know what love is? I said. She looked at me in surprise. My
question was silly and naïve. Of course, she said. Do you love your fiancé? I
said. I do, she said. When we got engaged I couldn’t stand him, but later on I
loved him. Her voice was raised. Why are you upset? I said. That’s just how I
talk, she said. Then she said she wanted to shower but that if she did her hair
would be a mess and she’d have to go to the hairdresser again. The bell rang. I
got my notebook and went to open the door but it was my sister’s fiancé.
Standing behind him was his friend, Husniyya. Husniyya said to my sister, Can
you believe it, my fiancé is jealous of my uncle. He says I spend all my time
with my uncle. My sister’s fiancé said he had spent all day looking for a water
heater and bought a refrigerator. Does anyone know someone traveling abroad who
could bring me back a tape recorder? he said. Husniyya’s uncle came and took
them all to the cinema and I was left on my own at my desk. I tried to write.
The bell rang and I rushed to the door hoping that something would happen, that
someone would come. It was the clothes presser. The bell rang again. Opening the
door, I was surprised to see Nihad and her father. They swept into the room and
said, You must come to our house tomorrow. I said to Nihad, You’ve really
changed. She smiled nicely and said, The last time you saw me, I was very young.
They refused to sit down and said that Nihad’s mother was waiting in the car and
I said goodbye to them outside and then went back to my room. I smoked greedily,
thinking, unable to write. She had looked at me very closely. I supposed she had
heard a lot about me and must have been impressed. The bell rang a third time, a
long and powerful ring. I got my notebook and went to the door and opened it and
gave the notebook to the policeman, then went back to my room and turned the
light off and lay down on the bed and went to sleep. I woke up startled by the
sound of the bell. When I opened the door no one was there. I went back to my
room and left its door open and went back to sleep. I got up early in the
morning and shaved and dressed and took a clean shirt to the clothes presser and
went back and changed, then went downstairs and looked for a place to have my
shoes shined. I bought the papers and finally got on the metro. The conductor
stopped to put a lump of opium in his mouth and sip some tea. Lucky man, I
thought. He’d found a way to live that let him put on a brave face. He resumed
driving very slowly. I wished he would speed up so that I wouldn’t be late and
the dust wouldn’t ruin my elegant get-up. I got off a long way away from the
house and caught a taxi and stopped it in front of the house. I looked up at the
balconies and saw no one. So I climbed up to the top floor and found Nihad with
her mother at the table. They hadn’t seen the taxi. I sat down with them. Nihad
was studying. I looked at her hard. Her lips were as I’d hoped. The lower one
was curved and her teeth showed a little. Her voice was calm and graceful. Her
mother asked what I was doing now. Her voice was rather loud. I told her I was
writing. Are you writing stories? she said. Yes, I said. Out of books? No, I
said, from my head. And Nihad said, You must be a big shot. I lit a cigarette.
You should settle down, her mother said. America is wonderful, Nihad said. What
do you think? I like some things and not others, I said. Forget all this and
look out for yourself, she said. Then she said, Help me study. Her voice was
very soft. I had had enough of loud voices. Can you believe what they did to my
father? she said. They threw him out of his company after they took it away from
him. She said they had conspired against him and accused him of fraud. Let’s
eat, they said, and we went down to the ground floor. We sat at the table and I
took some salad and rice on my plate and Nihad asked me, Thigh or breast? My
sister had warned me. Don’t take a thigh, she said, you won’t know how to eat it
with a knife and fork. I don’t know what got into me but I said to her, Give me
the thigh. She put it in front of me and I grabbed the knife and fork and when I
stuck the fork in the thigh flew up from my plate and landed in the salad bowl.
That’s not how chicken is eaten, Nihad said calmly. Eat it with your fingers. I
said that my sister had warned me but I didn’t pay attention to her warning. Her
father ate his thigh with a knife and fork. The mother said that in Europe they
didn’t eat the thigh with a knife and fork and after that I didn’t know how to
eat. I made a mess of the macaroni and watermelon. What do you think of the
situation? they said. The father said that he’d met people coming from Russia
and that the poverty there was terrible. He said capitalism was better. Who can
argue with that? Nihad said forcefully. Then she said, Do you believe in our
Lord? I got up and washed my hands and dried them on a towel and we went
upstairs. They offered cigarettes but I didn’t feel like smoking. The father
spoke on the telephone. He wanted to buy the land next door. The mother put her
hand to her cheek and faded out. The father came in to sleep and Nihad said, Are
you tired? No, I said, and we went back to studying. The father woke up and
unrolled the prayer mat in front of us and made his prayers, then sat down next
to us and they brought tea. How’s Nihad doing? he said. Very well, I said.
Behind us they turned the television on to a very high volume. The maid and the
cook and the nanny came in and sat on the floor to watch. Nihad was ignoring me
and watching the film. She said, Ahmad Ramzi is amazing. I started to get tired.
She got up and sat beside me. Her bare forearm was next to me. She was careful
not to touch. The mother heard me explain a word in English and said, No, that’s
not what it means. Then the father broke in, though he only knew French. He said
the word in French had a different meaning. I said nothing while the mother and
father fought. The mother asked me to support her version. Usually that’s the
meaning, I said. No, the father said, giving me a look. More or less, I said.
Then the noise from the television got very loud. Nihad said that a director had
seen her that morning and said that she looked like Lubna Abdel Aziz. Some
visitors arrived and Nihad got up to welcome them and sat with them at the other
end of the room. She talked with them very animatedly, then ignored them to
watch Ahmad Ramzi. I had a splitting headache and got up to leave. One of the
visitors looked at me inquiringly. I’m the son of so-and-so, I said. She laughed
and pointed to her nose, then twirled an imaginary mustache, lifting its tips.
The one with the big mustache? she said. Yes, I said. The mother shouted, Come
here. I wondered if she was feeling bad for me and would give me five guineas.
She signaled for me to follow her to her room. Her maid was sitting on a chair,
a plump dark girl. My class of woman, I said to myself. I thought that if I
spoke with the mother I could marry her. Then they could say they had helped me
find a good wife, just the right kind for me. The mother handed me some
rolled-up papers and said it was a bolt of fabric. I didn’t know what to say. I
had decided to say no if she offered me money, but I hadn’t counted on an offer
of fabric. I got annoyed and said no, but she insisted. You’re like my son, she
said. I didn’t know what to do. I took it and told myself that anyway I had
gotten a suit out of it. I went back to the living room and Nihad went with me
to the stairs and I left the house, not looking up. I walked and my shoes filled
with dust
and I didn’t care. I got on the metro. It was terrifyingly crowded. My
clothes were crumpled. I didn’t protest. At one stop the train was assaulted by
tens of workers on their way home. They forced their way through the crowd and
one of them stood in front of me. His eyes were bloodshot. Another leaned
against a row of seats and stared from the window and began to fall asleep. When
I looked at him again his head was bouncing along with the movement of the train
and knocking into the seats while he fell deeper and deeper into sleep. When I
got off I saw the same girl I had seen before, walking slowly next to the train
rails. I went up to my room and put the key in the lock. It was the same door
and the same key for all families of our class. I went in and took my clothes
off and put my trousers on a hanger and hung them from the wall. Then I
showered. Then I sat down at my desk and turned on the transistor. The roll of
fabric was in front of me. I opened it. It was pajama fabric, not suit fabric. I
lit a cigarette. My sister appeared and said, How much is left of the fifty
piastres? I counted up my transportation costs, but didn’t dare tell her about
the ten piastres the taxi had cost. Her fiancé appeared and said he had stood
for two hours outside the cooperative to buy meat. He said the situation was
unbearable. You guys want to spread poverty, he said. There’s no way for me to
make money. If I build something, the government would take it away. Adel and
his wife came and I offered him a cigarette and he said, I don’t smoke and I
don’t drink coffee. He said that he only had a cup of tea in the morning, but
that his bill at the office was thirty piastres a day because of the demands of
his co-workers. Unlike them, he didn’t take bribes. Too bad, his wife said. No
one can talk to workers anymore, she said. Adel said that the chauffer of his
uncle, Fahmy Bey, didn’t get up until ten in the morning, although Fahmy Bey was
up at dawn. He said to my sister’s fiancé, I’ll show you the best place to buy a
soap dish. My sister said she needed a maid, but where could she find one? Her
fiancé said that he had ordered a Ronson lighter, which was on its way from
Beirut. We have to go now, they all said. They went and I was left at my desk,
smoking. Then I got up and turned the light off and stood by the window,
breathing in the air. My window looked out on the backs of several apartments. I
could see only a little stretch of the street. I stuck my head out and twisted
my neck so I could see the lit-up shops and the people coming and going. Then I
tired of this and pulled my head back in and rested my arm on the window ledge.
Across from me there was a darkened window. It lit up suddenly, showing a young
woman slowly removing her clothes. Eventually she was completely naked. She
threw herself on a bed in the corner of the room and lay face down, her back
turned to the light. I stared at her shapely body and the dark shadows the light
left along her curves. Then the bell rang. I got my notebook and stalled for a
moment, lighting a cigarette and picking up the pack to take with me. The bell
rang again and I went quickly to the door. I opened it and gave the policeman
the notebook while taking out the pack of cigarettes. I gave him a cigarette,
then he left and I went back to my room and tossed the notebook on the desk. I
glanced over at the window opposite. It had gone dark. I stretched out on the
bed and smoked the cigarette all the way down, then flicked it out the window
and slept. In the morning I bought a magazine and a small glass of milk and some
bread. I went home and boiled the milk and put some sugar in it, then dunked the
bread in the milk while reading the magazine. Then I went out and caught the
metro. It stopped just before Emergency Station and all the passengers got off.
Several cars were turned over on their sides next to the rails. Their blackened
innards stuck out. I walked to the café where Magdi liked to sit. He was there
by himself in a corner. He said, We must affirm our existence. I examined the
wrinkles that had dug themselves all over his face. He said, They’re all sons of
bitches. Then he said, With the people, you’re strong, on your own, you’re weak.
His face crumpled.

Looking at him you wouldn’t know if he was full of hate or
pain. Is there anyone who doesn’t hate, doesn’t suffer? From a desire for power
and from cowardice? From the loss of love and the failure to love? From contempt
for others and a need for company? From being brutalized and behaving brutally?
From suffering pain and the joy of causing it? From complete self-confidence and
the conviction one is a failure? From lovelessness and the exploitation of love
(which you use like bricks to build your own house)? From the belief that
everyone admires you and has faith in you and from abandonment? At the beginning
it was a noble cause. Now it’s a curse. No more sympathy for others. . . . When
he stood there with his back dripping blood he was resolute, unbreakable. He
took pleasure in standing firm. But no one cares about all that anymore. The
world has changed. It’s no accident the words on his lips don’t mean what they
used to. Some of them are practically meaningless. . . . He was in on the game,
he understood its rules, he played by them. But they turned the rules against
him and now he’s the one weeping. The worst thing is to begin searching for
yourself when it’s too late. . . . He said that he’d never fallen in love and
that he always believed he was better than the rest — maybe he was, there’s
nothing to prove otherwise, and he gave all he had — but he lost. It was a game
without mercy and in fact without rules, where you couldn’t distinguish right
from wrong, where the winner wasn’t always the one in the right, but the
cleverest, the trickiest, the luckiest.