It was thus that Abu-‘Ali had grown so large, Shaikh Musa said (he was generally extremely reluctant to discuss Abu-‘Ali but on this occasion he permitted himself a laugh): for years he had eaten meat like other people ate beans, and eventually he had swollen up like one of the force-fed geese his wife reared on their roof.
‘Women use their forefingers to push corn down the throats of their geese,’ added Shaikh Musa’s son Ahmed, an earnest young man, who was a great deal more heedful of my duties as a gatherer of information than I. ‘Corn, as you ought to know, is harvested just before winter, towards the start of the Coptic year which begins in the month of Tût …’
It had long been a point of pride with Abu-‘Ali that he possessed more — more gadgets, especially — than anyone else in Lataifa. It was therefore a matter of bitter chagrin to him that he had not been the first person in the village to buy a television set. One of his own half-brothers, a schoolteacher, had beaten him to it.
He was often reminded of this by a cousin’s son, Jabir, a boy in his late teens, with bright, malicious eyes and a tongue that bristled with barbs. Sometimes, when we were sitting in Abu-‘Ali’s guest-room in the evenings, Jabir would turn to me and ask questions like ‘What’s the name of the captain of the Algerian soccer team?’ or ‘Who is the Raïs of India? Isn’t it Indira Gandhi?’ The questions were entirely rhetorical; he would answer them himself, and then, sighing with pleasure he would glance at his uncle and exclaim: ‘Oh there’s so much to be learnt from television. It’s lucky for us there’s one next door.’
It always worked.
‘I don’t understand this television business,’ Abu-‘Ali would roar. ‘What’s the point of buying a television set now, when our village doesn’t even have electricity?’
Smiling serenely, Jabir would point out that a television set could be run perfectly well on car batteries.
‘Car batteries!’ Abu-‘Ali’s voice would be breathy with contempt. That’s like burning up money. I’m telling you, and you pay attention, let the electricity come to Lataifa as the government’s promised, and you’ll be able to watch the biggest and best TV set you’ve ever seen, right here, in this room, God willing. It’ll be better than the best television set in Nashawy, insha’allah, and it’ll be in colour too.’
A sly smile would appear on Jabir’s blunt-featured face, with its adolescent’s crop of stubble and unquiet skin. ‘There’ll be other colour TVs here soon,’ he would say, leaning back contentedly against the bolsters on the couch. ‘My uncle Mustafa is going to get one for our house any one of these days, insha’allah.’
All Abu-‘Ali could do in retaliation was glare at him; he knew he was no match for Jabir’s tongue. He would have loved to ban Jabir from his house, but it so happened that Jabir’s father was a cousin in the paternal line, and thus a member of the extended family, or lineage, of which Abu-‘Ali was nominally the head: he couldn’t have thrown Jabir out of his house without offending a whole platoon of relatives. Besides, it so happened that Jabir was also best friends with one of Abu-‘Ali’s sons, a schoolboy of his own age, about sixteen or so. The two of them were always together, with their arms around each others’ shoulders, giggling, or talking in furtive, experimental whispers. There was little Abu-‘Ali could do to rid his house of him; constrained as he was by the obligations of kinship, he had to choke daily on the gall of hearing about the soccer matches that his son and Jabir watched on the TV set in the house next door.
‘What’s in this soccer stuff, I want to know?’ Abu-‘Ali would explode from time to time. ‘Isn’t there work to do? Allah! Is the world going to live on soccer? What’s going to become of …’
But laggardly though he may have been in the matter of television, Abu-‘Ali was undeniably the first person in the hamlet to acquire a form of motorized transport — a light Japanese moped, fragile in appearance, but extraordinarily sturdy in build. The moped was normally used by one of his older sons, who drove it to his college in Damanhour every day. He was very jealous of his custodianship of the vehicle and would never allow his brothers or cousins to use it — but his father, of course, was another matter altogether.
Every now and again, Abu-‘Ali would roll off his divan, send his wife in to fetch his best dark glasses, and shout for the moped to be wheeled out into the courtyard. He would hitch up the hem of his jallabeyya and then, lifting up his leg, he would mount the vehicle with a little sidelong hop, while his son held it steady. To me, watching from the roof, it seemed hardly credible that so delicate a machine would succeed in carrying a man of Abu-‘Ali’s weight over that bumpy dirt track. But to my astonishment it invariably did: he would go shooting off down the road, his jallabeyya ballooning out around him, while the moped, in profile, diminished into a thin, sharp line — it was like watching a gargantuan lollipop being carried away by its stick.
It was no accident that Abu-‘Ali had acquired so many possessions: everyone agreed that he had a remarkable talent for squeezing the last piastre from everything that came his way. People often said that it was useless to bargain with Abu-‘Ali: in the end he would get exactly what he wanted.
I was soon to discover the truth of this for myself.
One afternoon, about a month or so after I had arrived in Lataifa, Abu-‘Ali came up to my room to pay me a visit. This was an unusual event because it called for the climbing of a narrow flight of stairs. I lived on the roof of his house, in an old chicken-coop, which his wife had once used for her poultry. Her stock of ducks, chickens, pigeons and geese had been moved to a pen, at the far end of the roof, and the coop had been turned into a makeshift room for my benefit, with a bed, a desk and a chair.
I had discovered since moving in that an afternoon visit from Abu-‘Ali was generally good cause for apprehension. At that time of the day he was normally to be found lying inert upon his divan, resting after his midday meal; it was unusual for him to so much as turn on his side, much less attempt an assault on the stairs that led to the roof. He had only visited me twice before in the afternoon, and on both occasions it was because he had wanted a discussion in private, while his children were away at work or in school. On one of those occasions he had tried to lay claim to my transistor radio, my best-loved possession, and on the other he had indicated, after a prolonged and roundabout conversation, that the rent I was paying was not satisfactory and that either I or the ‘doktór’ who had brought me to his house would have to do something about it.
I had been brought to Abu-‘Ali’s house by Doctor Aly Issa, Professor in the University of Alexandria, and one of the most eminent anthropologists in the Middle East. An acquaintance of Doctor Issa’s had led us to Abu-‘Ali, who had declaimed: ‘I swear to you, ya doktór, the Indian shall stay here and we will look after him as we do our own sons, for your sake, ya doktór, because we respect you so much.’
Being the kindest and most generous of men, Doctor Issa had all too easily allowed himself to take Abu-‘Ali at his word. It had been agreed upon very quickly — all except how much I was to pay. The Professor had brushed aside my anxiety on that score: ‘That will be easily settled, I will write him a letter — don’t worry about it.’
And so he had, but Abu-‘Ali had seen little merit in Doctor Issa’s letter. Now, having settled himself on my bed, he took the dog-eared letter out of the pocket of his jallabeyya once again, and read it through, clicking his tongue and frowning.