Mahfouz ground out the cigarette with his heel and shrugged. I looked at him, baffled. Was that it? I hadn’t been expecting such an abrupt and fateful ending. But Mahfouz himself seemed to think it was pretty nifty, he looked at me as though awaiting my approval. He could keep waiting. I thought the story sucked.
It was in that same week that I saw Joe worried for the first time.
‘She took his passport,’ he said. ‘The crazy bitch.’
I raised my eyebrows in a query.
‘My mother. She’s hidden Mahfouz’s passport. She’s afraid he’s going to run away or something.’
Regina was going to great lengths not to lose her Arab.
‘She hid his fancy suit too. She thinks he attracts too much attention. From women.’
I’d already noticed that Mahfouz was looking a bit less natty lately. The people on the ferry no longer stared in amazement when he collected fares for Piet; an ebony Arab with a fragrant moustache and a linen suit tearing their tickets — that was something worth seeing!
Now that love had pitched its tent at his home, Joe was not at all pleased with the way things were going. India interpreted the events for him; he himself was still less than sensitive to the myriad possibilities of love.
‘You mean it’s sort of like your tastebuds?’ he asked India. ‘Sweet at the tip of your tongue, sour halfway and bitter all the way at the back? Is that what you’re saying, that love is sweet at first but gets more and more bitter the more she loves him?’
Even though the perception of saltiness was missing from his simile, I found the comparison rather apt: infatuation as the gateway to gullet and intestinal tract. It squared with what I’d read about it, and with things I’d noticed with my own parents. And somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about that ridiculous story about the pelican and the roast chicken.
As the grass smouldered in the fields and the sheep were rushed to the slaughterhouse with heat exhaustion because the farmers were too lazy to plant them a shade tree, I learned to drink. It’s the only thing Dirk ever taught me, oceanic drinking, drinking for as long as it takes to strip you of all dignity and make you a beast among beasts, braying for love and attention and too filthy to handle.
How does something like that get started?
You pass by the Sun Café and your eldest brother comes outside, because he saw you rolling by. You’re surprised that he’s even allowed in there, because they banned him, didn’t they? Whatever the case, Dirk’s already had a few and his mood is treacherously buoyant. He shouts, ‘You look a little hot under the collar, Frankie, come on in!’, and before you know it he’s pushed you into the Sun and shouted, ‘A beer for me and one for my little brother, Albert.’
Albert is the man behind the bar, otherwise it’s all men whose faces you know but whose names you’ve forgotten. What the hell are you doing here?
‘Stop looking like you’re going to bite someone, Frankie!’
Dirk is dangerously jovial and, to your deep disgust, has now referred to you as ‘my little brother’ for the first time in your life. The worst of it is, you know exactly why: today you’re his circus animal, he’s going to profit from your existence at last by having you drink your first beer in front of everyone and then laughing along with them as the beer runs down your chin and into your shirt. He’s getting the laughs and I’m getting the pity, but no one protests because ‘it’s his big brother, he knows what he’s doing’, and there’s the next beer already, and why not: if you want me to drink, you chump, then I’ll drink till that rotten smirk is wiped off your face, because this isn’t what you had in mind, having me change from your trained sea lion into your shame and fury, because you can’t keep anything under control without rage and bullying. . All right, Albert, my throat’s dry as dust and my brother’s footing the bill. . and if I take a bite out of your glasses it’s only because I’m spastic as all get out, but hey, the way I spit out the glass in a glistening stream of slivers and blood, that’s pretty nifty, isn’t it, guys?
That’s how something like that gets started.
And how far do you have to go to be purged of their pity? Not very far. I drank till I fell on my face, lowing like a cow, and they lifted me back into my cart and bought me no more beer. By that time Dirk was already so pissed off that he would have whacked me one if it hadn’t been so unseemly to punch a cripple in public.
What surprised me most was how much noise I made. They thought that was funny at first. The alcohol kindled a fire under my usual soundlessness. It was as though my gullet ripped open, oxygen swirled around and I screamed, man, I screamed. It had been a couple of years since Dirk had heard me make a sound, he couldn’t believe his ears. Once the novelty had worn off, the men just grimaced a bit uneasily as I blasted my foghorn.
‘That’ll be enough of that,’ the barman said.
Dirk yanked on my arm. He could fuck off. The men turned back to the bar, one of them said, ‘They’re all the same, the lot of them.’ And although Dirk knew exactly what he was referring to, he was glad to be able to turn his attention to something else.
‘So what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ the man said without turning around.
‘That we’re all the same.’
The man looked at him as though he smelled something foul. This was Dirk in due form, this was what he was known for. I saw the iron descend into his body and the rage darken his eyes; this was the Dirk I knew: old Dirk If-you-can’t-pound-the-shit-out-of-it-then-try-fucking-it Hermans.
‘What’s eating you, asshole?’ the man said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Dirk said. ‘You dirty piece of shit.’
And before I knew what was happening Dirk had slammed the man’s forehead down on the bar. Blood spattered from his wrinkles. The man came off his stool with a roar and threw himself on my brother, but got such a hard thump that the glasswork tinkled on the shelf. The others jumped up, apparently compelled somehow to act as a unit in the event of an attack from outside, and now Dirk had five on him instead of only one. But, like I said before, he couldn’t count past three anyway. The bastard went down like a drowning man. Two of them dragged him toward the door and the others kicked and punched him so hard that they hurt themselves. They ignored me. When I saw that crowd of mechanics and masons piling onto Dirk, for whom I’d never felt one millisecond of sympathy, let alone brotherly love, something weird happened: I got angry. Almost too angry to breathe. Raging inside me was something you might call ‘the cry of blood’, in any case something I’d never counted on. Reeling under this new sensation, I threw off the brakes and rammed my cart as hard as I could into the scrimmage.
I smashed into a guy who had his back turned to me as he whacked away at Dirk. My cart hit him behind the knees, buckling his legs forward and throwing his upper body back so that I could grab him by the throat with the only weapon I had: my hand. It found his windpipe and squeezed. His arms flailed but found no purchase. The hand squeezed harder, the fingers sinking into flesh. I felt muscles contracting in mortal fear, and the wild pounding of blood. I remember pleasure and the need to kill him. It was going to be easy. Just don’t let go and squeeze harder, that was all. Tear out his gullet. My fingers were tingling. The others let Dirk go and started in on me, they yanked on my arm with that purple head and lolling tongue attached to the end of it, and punched me in the head without mercy. Amid the rain of blows I saw the face growing darker all the time. Oh God please let me murder him—