Cigarette Number Seven Read online

  I clung to his arm. “I said I’m not scared.”

  “Why don’t we leave now? Let’s go get an ice cream at Groppi, then go home.”

  “But I don’t want to leave!” I said stubbornly. “Please, let’s stay a bit longer.”

  “OK, but only fifteen minutes, then we have to go—before the beating starts.”

  He was firm about this. I didn’t get it at the time. What beating? And why? I didn’t see anything that called for a beating. The man chanting made me sad, for a reason I didn’t quite understand. He himself seemed sad. His voice was hoarse from all the chanting, but still loud. I imagined myself in his place, carried on someone’s shoulders, my thin voice convincing no one. The names they repeated in their chants must have been those of bad people, or, as my father put it, “bastards.” My father’s foul language used to make me blush. Only years later did I realize that his language was not foul enough to describe those bad people.

  That day, we waited until my father—the omniscient god in my small world—sensed that the beating was about to start. He dragged me toward Groppi Café.

  We sat at one of the old and rusty metal tables. People were gathering by the windows and the door, whispering to each other as they tried to see what was happening outside. My father ordered a mastic ice cream for me and a medium-sweet coffee for himself. I was not scared. I was ten years old. Nothing scared me, and I had my father’s hand to hold on to. How could I be scared then? My father did not look out the window; he knew exactly what was happening outside. Every now and then we would see someone run toward one of the surrounding buildings. We heard muffled noises. My heart sank. Cautiously, I asked, “Baba, has the beating started?”

  “Yes, but don’t be scared. No one is going to harm us.”

  “I told you I’m not scared.” I hit the table with my open palm. “I just want to know who’s beating who. And what they did.”

  He answered, “Well, sweetie, the policemen outside are beating the people who were yelling. And the people who were yelling don’t like that there are bad guys in our country. And they also don’t like that when they say that the bad guys are bad guys, they get a beating.”

  I found all this very strange. “But why don’t they call the police? The police would handle the bad guys.”

  He looked at me with something close to pity. “Didn’t you see the policemen outside? They’re the ones doing the beating. They work for the bad guys. It’s ugly, I know. The people outside want to change all those ugly things.”

  I frowned, beginning to sense the gravity of the situation. The bad guys were vile and the police were vile. The people outside were getting a beating because there weren’t many of them. I reached this conclusion as I got ice cream all over my face at Groppi and a small battle raged outside. I wasn’t scared; I had my father’s hand.

  We left and got into our blue Fiat 128 and drove over the big bridge, my father talking the whole way. Sometimes I got confused: was he talking to me or, as was more often the case, to himself? He was talking about prison.

  “In the sixties, when I was arrested during the big crackdown, we were taken to al-Wahat, a very big prison near the Western Desert oases. It was rough. We were beaten often. I’ll show you the scar I still have on my leg when we get home. They sometimes used a whip, which wasn’t even the worst thing. Everyone was beaten, left and right.”

  I later understood he meant the political left and right.

  “We couldn’t stand each other, but I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for myself too.” The next car veered too close and jammed us up against the sidewalk. “You call that driving, you moron!”

  I listened, swaying between apprehension, fascination, and anger. I imagined a big room where one of the bad guys made the good guys line up on both sides—left and right, as my father had said—and gave them a beating with the whip, which in my mind was a thick red hose, not unlike the one we had in our bathroom and which my mother often put to similar use when I did something she didn’t like.

  “Baba, keep going. Then what?”

  He was still looking at the other car in the rearview mirror. “Well, not much. They kept moving us from one prison to another. It was shit. But you know what? Somehow those were good days. I wrote a lot in prison—stories that I still have. I had all my friends there with me, and I made new friends I still have to this day. I mean, if it wasn’t prison and we weren’t being beaten up, I would have wished those days would never come to an end.”

  I listened to my father and tried to understand what he was saying about prison, about torture, about friendship. I wondered if he and I could be taken to prison by the police I had seen earlier, and if, once there, we would relive the magical stories he was telling me. The thought filled me with fear and awe. But my father had a weak heart now. He wouldn’t be able to withstand a beating from the red hose. I, on the other hand, was used to the hose and could take anything.

  Take me, you brutes, and leave my father!

  8

  The first time I met Ali, we were in a large, crowded coffeehouse. Someone was talking incessantly at me so I was too distracted to give Ali’s eyes the attention I immediately understood they deserved. I captured the moment and saved it: Ali’s eyes were to be my discovery of the year. The coffeehouse was crowded and loud. I hate crowds and I hate noise, so I wasn’t relaxed. I stole a few curious glances at Ali, but we didn’t talk that day.

  The next time I saw him was at my place. There were fourteen of us, in a space that could barely fit four, for the sunset meal one joyful Ramadan evening. Some mutual friends brought Ali along, and finally I met him properly. His irises were one solid color—I still don’t know how to describe his eyes, except that they seemed to me like windows onto the world.

  I could never understand the dazzling look in Ali’s eyes. Did he see an unspoiled world? Did he see these damaged people as children, discovering the world for the first time, touching everything with their curious fingers? Did he look up at a clear sky? Was the world for him like Alice’s Wonderland? Did he see trees in brilliant greens and yellows with blossoms that reached the limits of color? Did he see colorful birds and white doves flying in peace, out of the hunter’s reach? Did he see us as we really were, underneath the smoke and smog and petty things that killed the sparkle in our eyes? Were our eyes—the eyes of those of us who were damaged by blood and defeat and unfinished revolutions—innocent and pure to him as well?

  How did he see the world and us? How did his eyes carry so much innocence and wonder and peace?

  The strange thing was that whether he smiled, laughed, or frowned, there were no lines around his eyes. They stayed calm and clear, nothing disturbing the innocence that emanated from them. When his gaze escaped into faraway meditations or memories, or even to painful thoughts, the same look remained, the same clarity that was like a soft wave caressing a sandless beach.

  In one lucid moment, which I carefully captured and preserved, I knew I was going to fall in love with Ali, that my destiny would be tied to his. I woke up a few days later to find his hand clutching my wrist. He was clinging to my hand in his sleep, his breathing close to my face. Love was fearful at first, reluctant, drawing near for a moment before disappearing for days—I could see it and not see it. But time passed beautifully. The doubts came and went.

  When I looked out of the big window in my apartment, Ali would come up close behind me and put his arms around me; he held me tightly and rested his head on my shoulder, and time stood still.

  Not all my moments with Ali could be captured. It was an incomplete happiness. But when he looked at me, my heart skipped a beat. When I received him at the door of my small apartment I was embraced by the universe. I was miserable when he left, but every time he returned, he brought whole galaxies with him. Ali was everything I wanted to see every time I opened my eyes. Ali was the path I would follow until I closed my eyes for the last time and crossed over to another world.

  9

  I only
like to walk on the beach. I don’t like swimming in the sea—all the salt water and jellyfish and mysterious creatures and dangerous currents. No, I don’t like swimming in the sea at all. I don’t really like walking either. Lying on the sofa has always been my ultimate pleasure. But I do like walking by any body of water.

  In my early teens, I used to walk by the canal near my grandmother’s house. It would be cold, the streets nearly empty. Canal water is dark, without the beauty of the sea. I would walk and walk until I got to the base of the big statue where I sat down to count the passing ships. They were giant oil tankers. I could smell their cargo as I counted them and watched those who came and went around me: men, women, young people, strolling as people do by the water. Children played by the base of the statue, but I barely heard the noise they made.

  I got that feeling whenever I found myself surrounded by water. I imagined myself floating on its heavy surface, and sometimes I imagined myself surrendering to its depths. I dreamed about death a lot, though I wasn’t really sure if they were dreams or visions. I saw myself dead in a variety of clichéd ways: I opened the door of a speeding car and rolled on the asphalt until blood poured out of my body. I walked on the narrow ledge of the balcony, my back to the building’s cement wall. Then, calmly, without any of the fuss of jumping, I let my feet slip into the air. I stuck the kitchen knife into my wrist. A fountain of blood gushed out. I saw myself dying all the time. Death was the only dream that stayed with me. An overdose of sleeping pills. A rope around my neck. And I was always fully present, executing my death with skill.

  Sitting under that impressive statue by the canal, I couldn’t have known that, many eventful years later, I would become even more adept at these thoughts. I couldn’t have known that, as I sat chain-smoking and contemplating the ceiling in my small studio—the smallest apartment in the world—I would still be at exactly the same spot.

  My studio was almost unlit, tiny. It had no rooms. Just a few meters of space, a small sofa bed, two lamps that gave off a faint yellow light, a big comfortable sleep-inviting armchair, and a “wailing wall”—the large bathroom that was perfectly suited for locking oneself in to cry. Many people visited that place: friends and work colleagues. Dozens of friends and friends of friends used to stay over, in complex sleeping arrangements.

  *

  The first time my father came to visit, I cleaned the apartment and prepared a feast.

  For two days I stood in the kitchen, making all his favorite dishes. I made rice with semolina, boiled in chicken broth, the way he liked it. The chicken was well marinated with all kinds of spices, except black pepper, which he was allergic to. I put a large onion in a clay pot, added carrots, peas, zucchini, and potatoes, drizzled everything with olive oil, and placed the pot in the oven until the vegetables were crisp and golden. All were relatively low-fat dishes that wouldn’t give him atheroma or threaten his weak heart. I cut the salad into big chunks—my father believed that small-cut vegetables lost their health benefits. He also liked mint leaves in his salad. I made fresh orange juice. I prepared everything. I compiled a playlist on my new laptop of songs by Abd al-Wahhab—his favorite musician—and waited for him.

  While we ate, my father told me the story of how he met my mother. Whenever I teased him that it was a mistake, he would reply, laughing, that it was the mistake that gave me life.

  With a smile full of nostalgia he began to speak:

  “I was in Germany. I went there after the 1967 defeat, once I had been released from prison, and had written a book about all the traumas in my life. I left wanting nothing more to do with Egypt and lived like a drifter, working one day out of ten. At night I cried because I couldn’t go back. I missed Nasser’s funeral and, like all the other exiles, cried as I watched it on TV. Then one day, I found out from a friend that the novel I had written was finally being published in Egypt. I asked several friends to buy copies and keep them for me in case it sold out. Among those I asked was my niece, who wasted no time and went straight to the Cairo Book Fair. What I didn’t know then was that she had taken a friend from university along. They were young, early twenties, while I was well into my forties. A few days later, a week or so, I got a letter from Egypt. It was from a young woman, your cousin’s friend, who later became your mother, saying that she had read my book, was in love with me, and wanted to marry me. I was spellbound. I thought she must be hideous, with protruding teeth or something, or pretty but stupid. But still, I couldn’t resist. I replied, and we wrote to each other for over a year. She sent me her photo. She was so beautiful, much more beautiful than I could have imagined. And she was intelligent too.”

  “So you fell in love with her?”

  “Of course. I loved her very much, even before I met her. She was the fairy tale in my life—it was a story that could only happen in a novel. That in itself was enough for me to love her. I came back, we met, we got on with our lives, and we got married.”

  “I have no idea how Grandma agreed to it, Baba.”

  After a long laugh, he said, “Your grandmother was a powerful woman, but your mother even more so. When I went to propose, your grandmother told me, ‘Listen, son, you are a poor man, a piecemeal journalist, you don’t own an apartment, you’re always on the move between countries, so you’re not the settling type, and you’re more than twenty years older than my daughter, and—no offense intended—you have a criminal record. Let’s just say that I have no daughters available for marriage.’

  “Of course, your mother heard that and went berserk. Yet she had a plan. She stayed home for a week, and then she called me and we agreed to meet the following day. She left the house, we met, and we went to the marriage registrar. We got married without telling anyone. She said that was the only way, and I guess she was right. Look, at the time she was definitely right. She then left me and went back home. There, she placed our marriage certificate on the dining table before your grandmother and told her she now had two options. One was to accept the marriage: we would have a small wedding and avoid a scandal. Or I would go and claim her by the power of law. I was, after all, her husband. Once the fights, abuse, and breakdowns had subsided, your grandmother agreed to the first option. We had a wedding and were officially married. So there you go.”

  I was mesmerized by that story. I couldn’t believe how strong-willed and capable my mother was, or how much my father was in love with her. It was like she was a different person. The story of their marriage was inspiring for someone like me. I would often sit in my father’s study, on the floor by his feet, and read their letters. He kept them in a big bundle inside a large brown envelope in his third drawer.

  The three drawers in my father’s desk were my magic world. In the first, he kept important documents—his ID, passport, sometimes a bit of money. The second drawer held all his prescription glasses since he was a child, a beautiful brown pipe, an old vitamin C tube where he kept copper and silver coins from different countries, binoculars that he once allowed me to use to watch a ballet at the opera, many unused packs of medicine, newspaper cuttings (probably cut out years ago, then forgotten along with their contexts), photos of me at different stages of my life, photos of us at my childhood birthdays and on the beach in Montazah and Marsa Matruh, countless photos of the woman he loved before my mother, and photos of them together in different countries—she was tall and slim and always wearing very big sunglasses. There were pictures of my father with friends all over the world—Berlin, Baghdad, London, New York, Malaysia, and other places I didn’t recognize.

  That second drawer was filled with details and memories that belonged to my father alone. Many things were indecipherable to me, and he always eluded my questions with an enigmatic smile. But the third drawer was my favorite. It was full of papers. Nothing but papers. A mass of handwritten papers—the large brown envelope with the letters to my mother, many unfinished stories, manuscripts of short stories that were later published, manuscripts from other writers. I liked to open that drawer while
my father was asleep and read everything I could read. The third drawer was inexhaustible: I would find something new every day, new papers and new stories. All the stories were beautiful, even if most were unfinished.

  10

  My father taught me never to stay on the margins. I must stand firmly inside the picture and not let anyone push me to the sidelines; otherwise I might lose the desire to live and become useless. As I marched with the crowds in the direction of the Ministry of Interior, that thought filled my head. Things were heating up. Some of the young people were starting to lose their tempers in the face of the provocative, cocky smiles of the Central Security officers. I reached for my father and pulled him by the hand to make sure we walked in the middle of the march. Because of his illness and his weak heart, he wouldn’t have been able to run if things turned violent, so I slowed down to give us some room for escape. We entered the street leading to the ministry. The march was huge. The chants echoed in my head, powerful and defiant. So many people and so much zeal—but all I heard were echoes, and all I saw was my father’s face, his eyes bright with anticipation and awe.

  The protestors started to throw stones at the security forces, or maybe it was the other way around—I wasn’t sure who started it; it seemed to happen at an agreed moment. I quickly pulled my father toward a nearby building, worried I wouldn’t be able to protect him. I whispered in his ear, “Let’s try to leave by the back streets and pretend we were just passing through.” He didn’t answer and kept his eyes on the battle with growing concern. “This violence is foolish. The bastards will kill those kids.”

  “Bastards”—the term that always and forever, whenever it was uttered by my father, referred to the security forces, all and any security forces, in a sweeping generalization that allowed for no exceptions.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Things have to calm down soon. Let’s just leave.”