But they changed all that, boomed Ahmad. And if you think Trotsky and Lenin set the world on its head, you should have seen what old Menelik and my father did right here in Cairo decades earlier. Fearlessly they went from café to café, convincing their fellow dragomen the time had come to stand up, to shriek, to speak out against these intolerable forced vacations that stretched on from spring through summer to autumn. Oh it was a time of fervor, all right. A time when there was electricity in the air.
I'm beginning to feel it, said Joe. It sounds like a regular spring thundersquall bursting over Cairo, with intellectual lightning just everywhere.
Ahmad whirled on him, his eyes afire, his voice crackling with emotion.
Ram it, he thundered. Up until then dragomen had always been mere rams for hire during the winter season, while being scorned during all other seasons. But no longer. Not after old Menelik and my father launched the Movement. And how did the idea for this great revolutionary crusade begin? This secular jihad to free the toiling masses of dragomandom?
Small, I bet, said Joe. That always seems to be the way.
Ahmad was somber, thoughtful.
Would you believe me if I told you it began in a small way? But always my father was passionately hammering away at the same inspiring theme. . . . You have to get out of the cafés and into the streets, he said. If you want your power to be felt, organize. If you want to make them listen to you, organize.
There's only one way to change history. Organize.
Straight ahead through the centuries, said Joe. But was old Menelik really so interested in politics as a young man? I'd always heard he was only a dragoman for a winter or so, to make ends meet while he was getting his hieroglyphs together. Do I have it wrong?
Abruptly Ahmad's face darkened.
Menelik went underground, that's all. Down into tombs. But he continued the struggle there.
Oh I see.
And his heart was always aboveground with my father and the cause, said Ahmad, who then began offering up a host of elaborate excuses to explain Menelik's speedy departure from the Movement which made it clear Joe hadn't been wrong at all.
In fact although the idea for a dragomen's benevolent society had originally been Menelik's, the black scholar had lost interest in café agitation almost at once, due to his increasing fascination with buried graffiti and forgotten facts and subterranean reality in general the everyday spadework of Egyptology.
What Ahmad had been referring to when he admitted that the black scholar had gone underground.
But it was also apparent that Ahmad didn't like to dwell on this subterranean aspect of Menelik's life.
And the reason Ahmad couldn't accept these underground truths, refusing even to acknowledge their existence beneath the shifting sands of Egypt, was because he wanted so desperately to believe the founding of a dragomen's benevolent society in Cairo had been the most dramatic event of the nineteenth century, and therefore the most significant cause that anyone could have taken part in then.
And all because that was what his father had done.
Democracy in action, boomed Ahmad, all his old enthusiasm returning. My father and his fellow dragomen discussed everything under the sun as they lounged away the hours in cafés, and there were superb speeches and vivid manifestos, not to mention all the poignant true-life stories that were constantly being retold and retold. The times were alive then, and there was even talk of founding a new nation or a new world-order dedicated to pure dragomanly ideals.
And so we had verandaism, thundered Ahmad. And we had radical nocturnalism and revolutionary hotel-lobby restructuralism, and a revisionist humanist wing with no furniture, and the inevitable backroom lobby filled with cigar smoke, for the disabled. . . . Oh it was all there. And each faction had its hour of shrill ascendency as the final truth took shape, and then finally the enraged shouts erupted and the fighting slogans were unwound, and the downtrodden dragomen of Cairo rose up as one angry man and marched out of the cafés and into the streets. They just weren't going to take it anymore, and thus was born the International Brotherhood of Dragomen and Touts. Or simply the Brotherhood, as they were known to their supporters. Or the DTs, as their detractors so viciously referred to them.
There's never been any respect for minorities, said Joe.
Ahmad's massive nose flared. He sighed, gripping his powerful fists together.
I have to tell you things didn't turn out well for my father, he said in a quiet voice. In his later years my father became increasingly bitter and eventually refused to see anyone at all, even Cohen and the Sisters, and that's shocking when you think of it. For hadn't their midnight sails on the Nile once been the very talk of Cairo? Those bawdy tender nights when the four of them had dressed up in costumes and drifted riotously on the currents of the great river, drinking champagne from alabaster cups of pure moonlight?
Singing their songs to the stars and caressing the night with sensual laughter?
Oh yes, the four of them had been famous friends once, yet there came a time when my father stopped going out and refused to see even them. . . .
Ahmad lowered his eyes.
Underwear had always been my father's trademark in his professional life, the finest erotic underwear imported from Europe. But when he stopped leaving his rooms, he also stopped wearing underwear. At home, with just me around, he refused to wear any at all. The fantasy's gone, he used to say. My illusions have departed like an ancient scroll rolled up.
Ahmad hung his head.
And it was all because he felt the Movement had betrayed him. It's grown fat, he used to say. It's just not the same anymore, it's not what it used to be. And in his bitterness he began smoking more and more hemp, which increased his appetite so that he ate more and more, which made him fat.
Ahmad glowered.
Bloat. Revolting. The dragoman's anathema.
Ahmad's scowl deepened.
My father had worn a beard all his life, ever since he was a sleek young man. But when he rashly decided to shave it off thirty years later, what did he find lurking beneath his beard, time's cruel reward for his decades of selfless sacrifice on behalf of the Movement?
My God, said Joe, what did he find?
Wattles, thundered Ahmad. Deplorable. I have wattles, he confided to me one evening, his face all bandaged up to hide the fact, so heavily bandaged he looked like a mummy. In those later years people got into the habit of referring to him as Ahmad the Fat, and quite naturally they called me Ahmad the Thin. And since everyone else was using those names, we picked up the habit ourselves.
How is the fat one today? I would ask. Bitter and lonely, he would answer, and how is the thin one? . . .
Meaning me.
Ahmad shook his head sadly.
Sometimes when you feel defeated the world just seems to bear down on you, insulting you and humiliating you. I saw that happen to my father and it was terrible. He became a recluse and there was nothing I could do to make it any better for him. He played solitaire and read old newspapers and kept his face bandaged like a mummy, and he smoked hemp and never wore underwear and never stirred from his rooms. At least a game of solitaire can't betray me, he used to say. At least thirty-year-old newspapers can't lie.