My brother built the villa fifteen years ago and he said it was his wife who bought the land, which was when he realized she had money. My father was alive at the time. He would come every day to supervise the construction. We lived in a little room. My brother finished the construction and rented out the first floor and lived on the second, then married off his older daughter and rented the third floor to her. When his younger daughter married he emptied the first floor and rented it to her and stayed on the middle floor with his wife. In the beginning, he spent an hour each day pruning the hedges in his garden and smoking his pipe.
She asked if I would read to her husband. Her husband said that Sheikh Abdel Basit said that one prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque was worth a thousand piety points. They suggested we go downstairs to see the younger daughter. She met us at the door with her child in her arms. His eyes were close together. Isn’t my son beautiful? she said. She laughed, then laughed a little more to prompt her husband. He was standing next to her, fingering the stars of his uniform. He said that if a private so much as opened his mouth, he’d crack him across the face and shut him up. Then he said, It’s time for you to get married. Do as I did, he said. The most important thing about a girl is where she comes from. They turned on the television. My brother straightened his robe and smiled and said, Just watch this film. It was a story about a young woman who left a man her age and fell in love with an older man. When the film was over, my brother gave us a superior look. He took me to his room and shut the door and took out some old folders, then sat at his desk and lit a pipe. He showed me some stories he’d written and others he’d translated, a bunch of articles entitled “Dear Sir,” a book on body building, another
on the battles of the Second World War, a third about Prince Omar Toussoun, an old photograph of himself with a little hat and pipe in his garden, and another picture of him with a German girl. He said it was from the days of Rommel’s advance on Alexandria, when he’d started to learn German. Then he showed me a third picture of him at the offices of an American company and another of him at the offices of an Egyptian importer. I wish I had a little young thing, he said. And he said he had never been in love. And he said that yesterday he had wanted to sleep with his wife but she wouldn’t let him because he had made her buy fruit with her own money, but when he gave her two guineas she opened up. He gathered the papers and photographs and put them back in their folders. I’m finished now, he said. I’m going to raise rabbits. They called us to eat. Afterward, I left and went to the magazine and met Sirri. He said he’d like to help me but that under the circumstances there was nothing he could do. Have you read my pieces? he said. I’m the only one who writes like that now. Fuad is a trifler, he said, and would you believe he claimed I was his disciple? I left him and went to Sami’s office at the end of the corridor. This time he was there. I have no idea what you’ve been writing lately, he said. I stood next to his desk while he wrote something. He look up at me, puzzled. I won’t keep you, he said. Come see me in a couple days. I went out to the street and walked to the metro. I saw an extremely pretty girl through the window of an airlines office. I rode the metro home. There were no empty seats, so I stood and looked at the people. In the women’s car I saw a woman in profile. She was staring from the window wearing a sleeveless white dress. She looked exceptionally clean. She must have taken a shower before heading out. Her hair was long and silky and there was no way she’d had it done at a hairdresser. I noticed a little girl next to her. When she turned her whole face toward me and I saw her wine-dark complexion, my chest clenched. Her face had no shadow, no paint. I found myself staring into her eyes, which were large and clear, and for a moment I lost myself.
Her eyes were stars in silent space where I was swimming and sinking. It was night. Our eyes met and hers glimmered in the light and I saw myself in their wide-open whites and I saw her in their black depths. Her bare arm was next to me. Its skin was dark with a little red mixed in. It seemed warm. I wanted to touch it at the plump joint just below the shoulder. Her white blouse was airy and she wasn’t wearing an undershirt. I could see the points of her nipples beneath the blouse where they brushed against the silk. The skin of her face was soft, her lips were full and parted, the lower one making a little arch, and they were dark-colored as though scorched by some fire. When she looked at me she smiled and let her look linger. I got dizzy. When I pulled her toward me she went still, then pushed me away. We were sitting in the dark. She reached out her hand and played with my hair. It crept to the collar of my shirt, then to my back. She caressed my back with her palm. I drew her toward me and buried my face in her neck, taking pleasure in the softness of her skin on my cheek. I breathed in her clean smell and raised my head and kissed her lips and was lost. When I returned to the attack, she pushed me away. I studied her moods. When she tightened her lips and would not speak, I went mad wanting to know why. When she looked vulnerable or pitiable, I adored her. When I sat in front of her, looking at her face, her hands, her legs, I almost wept with desire. It hurt to look at her bright eyes, her mouthwatering cheeks. It hurt when my fingers crept over her arm and my leg inched toward her leg and she refused me. I was finally on the point of madness. I had almost given up when she took me in her arms and let me touch her breasts and hands and kiss her cheek and lips. But she was cold.
She turned her eyes away and didn’t look at me again. I got off at my stop and bought some food and went upstairs. The light was on in the wood-paneled room used by Husaniyya’s uncle and the door was open. When I looked in I saw him with his head in his hands, looking at a picture of a girl in a gold frame on the small table in front of him. It was a picture of Husaniyya. In the picture, her eyes were big and beautiful. I moved away before he sensed I was there. I went up to my room and took my clothes off and turned on the transistor, but there were no songs or music and it started to crackle. I sat and tried to write. The traces of my pleasure looked like black spots on the floor. Hasan came in and I told him we needed to get a woman right away. He said he would do his best, and left. He came back in half an hour and said, My brother’s on the stairs with a girl. Make yourself scarce for a while. We told her there were only two of us. I went to the kitchen and made some tea. Hasan came in and said his brother and the girl were in my room now. I carried the tea into the living room and put it on the table, then sat at the table. Hasan lit a cigarette and drummed his fingers on the table. Soon the door to the room opened and Hasan’s brother came out and I shook his hand. I had never met him before. He was a big man in his forties. Hasan went into the room and I offered his brother some tea. He said, How are things? Very good, I said. I pointed to the room and said, How is she? He shrugged. Not bad, he said. We drove all over but it was so late she was the only one we found. Hasan came out and said to me, Your turn. I took him aside and said, I can’t. He looked at me, surprised. What do you mean? I don’t know, I said. I don’t feel like it. He shook me. You’ve got to go in there, he said. This is a big deal. I said that I knew it was but that I couldn’t. Come on, he said, and shoved me toward the door. I went in and locked the door behind me. Hasan’s brother said from behind the door that the rubber was on the desk. I lit a cigarette and offered her one. She was sitting on the bed in her underclothes, wearing a cheap pink shirt with holes in it, like a white rag that had been dipped in blood and washed over and over but still kept the faded color of the blood. Her legs were bare. Her skirt was carefully folded on the desk. She said, I don’t want to smoke, let’s get on with it. Let’s have a cigarette first, I said. What’s your name? I want to get this over with, she said, and put her hand out to unbutton my pants. I turned her hand away gently and said, Just sleep with me tonight, then leave in the morning. Yeah, right, she laughed, and then pulled me toward her, trying to kiss me. I turned my mouth away from her face and stood up and took off my pants and underwear and picked up the rubber and began putting it on, but it ripped. I looked for another on the desk. There wasn’t one. The girl said, I’m clean. I opened the door and called to Hasan, I need one, and he gave me one from his pocket and I put it on and I threw myself on top of her. She tried to kiss me so I moved my face away and finally got up and put my clothes on. The other two took her out and I sat down and lit a cigarette. Ramsi came and I told him I hadn’t been able to sleep with the girl and he made fun of me. He had managed it. He met a girl in the street and went home with her and turned off the lights. It took ten minutes, then he gave her twenty-five piastres and looked at his face in the mirror. It was red. Nothing is worth anything, he said. Then he left. Soon the policeman came and then I turned off the light and slept. In the morning I went out and had breakfast in the street. I didn’t buy the papers. I went back to my room and my sister said my uncle was returning from Alexandria and that he was very sick and that I needed to go meet him. I went out and caught a metro, taking it to the station. I got off and crossed the square, passing through the entrance in the wall that surrounded the station. I found him standing on the platform. He looked just fine and his wife was standing next to him with an umbrella in her hand. His kids rushed to hail a taxi and they all got in and told me to meet them at home, so I got on the metro and went to meet them at their house and found him sitting on the sofa in his pajamas. His body seemed small and suddenly shrunken. I looked at his shoulders, which were thin beneath his t-shirt, and his little eyes, which were almost lost behind his thick glasses. His pajama pants were stained with big yellow blotches above the pouch between his legs. He said it had come on all of a sudden with shaking and a fever. They called the doctor, who said there was absolutely nothing wrong. He said his temperature had gone up in the night and that he thought he was going to die and sent for the doctor right away. The doctor said, Eat boiled vegetables and get a urine test. My uncle said he followed the doctor’s orders for one day. The day after he said, I’m eating chicken. We got up to eat and he fell on the meat, devouring it with gusto. Give me some liver, he said. I left them and went out, catching a metro to my cousin’s house. I told myself I would know the house by its blue windows, but when I got there I discovered they weren’t blue as I’d imagined. They were just ordinary, uncolored glass. It was the sky that had sometimes made them seem blue. All the panes were cracked. The facade of the house was yellow and dirty. The gate to the garden was open, propped against the wall. The garden itself was untended and its paving stones were torn up here and there. I took the path leading to the front door. There was dog shit along the wall. I climbed the stairs with their crumbling steps and knocked at the door. My aunt’s daughter opened it. At first I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was unkempt and scraggly, with many strands of gray. Her eyes were dull and the skin of her face was brown. From the living room, I looked into the south-facing room. I went in and said, Where’s the sewing machine you used to have here? She said, Do you still remember?