many friends, child
I am not sad anymore, child
but afraid
they will go and leave me again
to life and death!
And the bell rang and Sakhr came in and he had shaved his mustache and combed his hair and carried all the morning papers under his arm. The bell rang again and a well-dressed young man came in. Mona’s mother said, pointing toward Sakhr, This is a friend of my husband. And the young man said, I know him. Sakhr leaped up and put on his glasses and began pacing the room. There were some English and French books on the shelves and he began leafing through them, then placed a hand on his hip and carried one of these books over to the window and began leafing through its pages while observing the well-dressed young man from time to time over his glasses.
It must have been one of his happiest moments to discover there was someone who knew him for some reason. In the past he thought everyone knew him, then gradually he discovered the truth. The first time I saw him he was bare-chested, walking with slow steps and occasionally raising a finger to fiddle with his mustache. In those days, world leaders sported a variety of mustaches and it was no accident that each was distinct from the others. These mustaches turned out to be a trick. The men who wore them were gone and so was their fashion. They left nothing in the heart. They never had. And he began to beat his head against the steel door until it nearly split, crying.
Through the window I saw a girl in the house opposite embrace another girl, kissing her on the lips. Then a girl who was blind in one eye came into the room and cried and while she cried, Sakhr stroked her hair with his hand. And Mona’s mother said that the girl was like that, that as soon as she saw a man, she cried. Finally, Mona came home from school. I said to her, I’m a friend of your father and she gave me a suspicious look. I took her to the club. There were other children there and I asked them to take her into the water with them, since I didn’t know how to swim, and they took her away. She ran and played and was happy. There was a piece of wood that helped with swimming and she grabbed onto it. But another little girl, a fat girl, took the piece of wood from her and floated on top of it. Mona held on to the piece of wood. The little fat girl grabbed her hair and pushed her away from the piece of wood, taking the piece of wood and swimming on top of it. Mona was a long way from the edge of the pool. I ran quickly toward her. She was bobbing up and down in the water and gasping for air and her eyes were wide with fear and I called out to her but she sank beneath the water and didn’t reappear. One of the swimmers swam to help her and dragged her up, carrying her to me, and I took her home. While we were climbing the stairs, she said, If someone is there, I’m going to say you’re my father. Don’t say you aren’t. We went into the house. Her mother was getting dressed, so I waited. Then my eyes fell on the wall clock. I jumped up and rushed for the door and rushed into the street. The policeman would arrive at any moment. I reached my room, gasping for air, and found a letter waiting for me. I checked to see who had sent it. It was from Nagwa. I read the letter slowly, then I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed and read the letter again. She was wondering if we might meet again after all these years. I closed my eyes to see what I could remember of how she looked: her affectionate eyes, her tender mouth. The bell rang and I got up to open the door. It was the policeman. I asked him to wait and came back to the room with the notebook for him to sign. He left and I kept the notebook in my pocket for next time. The bell rang again. When I opened the door Nagwa was there. I embraced her. She hugged me back violently, pressing her whole body against my body. But I didn’t press against her, I pushed her away to look at her. Then I led her into the room and turned off the light and sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. Then I pulled her toward me and kissed her on her lips. She pulled her face away and said, Talk to me. I didn’t want to talk. I stroked her face. It was hot and soft. She pulled her face away, saying, Talk, say what happened. I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her head toward me and kissed her, gripping her lips between my lips. She bit me back in the same way, rough and unpracticed. Then she pulled away.
This is how it always was. The first time I kissed her, she acted shy. I was sitting next to her and the light was falling on her cheek and we had stopped talking. I rested my head on her shoulder and she didn’t object. I kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips. When we’d gathered a little more courage, she gripped my lower lip and bit down on it hard. It hurt. I wanted to feel her soft lip in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough of it. If I could have held her in my arms all day, I would have. I felt the heat in her face, in her thighs. Every time after that I would make her stand up naked and contemplate her thighs. They were beautiful and soft and dark. I would ask her to bare her forearms so I could kiss them and feel them against my body. But she hesitated. We would lie pressed together in the dark to forget the world, to forget everything. We thought of nothing, feared nothing, and when my cheek brushed her cheek, when our noses touched, when our heads rested against each other, when our eyes stared at the same place on the ceiling, then nothing else had any importance. Soon I would move my head and my lips would sneak over to her lips. We shared delicate kisses and rough kisses and then she would pull her head back and sigh. The first time she held me violently and said, Where were you all this time? Another time she said, Lover. I was quiet. The word echoed in my ear for the first time. I didn’t trust myself. But soon she turned away and said, I want to sleep. I lay on my back, eyes up on the ceiling, hoping she would turn and embrace me but soon I felt her regular breathing, the contented and peaceful breathing of someone sleeping. So I turned and raised myself up to look at her. Her head rested on her arm while she slept. Her hair was spread across her neck and her other arm rested on her side. I let my look linger all over her body, then dropped back on the bed.
She stretched out next to me and laid her cheek on my hand, offering me her face lit by a little moonlight. She said, I’ll do the talking. She talked for a long time, then stopped. I told her I was worn out, that I had always wanted her. I pulled her toward me but she pulled away. I asked her to bare her forearm and she did. I kissed her forearm and her shoulder in the moonlight but soon she said, It’s cold, and she covered them. Then she stretched out on her back. She must have been thinking the same thing I was thinking. Something was missing, something was broken. She said, I want to sleep. I pulled her toward me and kissed her. My lips wandered from cheek to ear, kissing her there until she shivered and raised her eyes to mine and smiled and said, And this, where did you learn this?
How could she remember while I had forgotten? When my lips climbed up her thigh and I kissed her there for the first time and she looked at me with a mixture of pleasure and surprise and shyness, she said, Where did you learn this?
I reached my hand toward her chest but she pushed it away and said, No. I rolled away, then stretched out beside her. I waited for her to turn and embrace me but she didn’t. I was awake. I felt the pain between my legs. I got up and went to the bathroom. I got rid of my desire, then came back and stretched out beside her. I slept and woke and slept again and when I opened my eyes it was morning and she had already put her clothes on. I’m leaving now, she said. When will I see you? I asked. I’ll come by, she said. I stayed there stretched out on the bed, then finally got up and washed. I put some powdered soap in a basin of water and stirred it until the foam rose, then put my dirty clothes in. My sister and her fiancé came by. I put my clothes on and we went out and I bought the morning papers. In the entrance to the building we met a friend of my sister and her uncle and we went to a café. My sister’s fiancé said, We want to be happy for you. That will take time, I said. Why? he asked. Love isn’t easy, I said. He shrugged and said, Here’s my advice, love comes after marriage. The uncle said, I’ve been married five times. I left them and went to see Sami at his place. I was brought into the living room and waited for him a long time. A little girl came in whom I recognized as his daughter. She walked up to me. I felt uncomfortable. I needed to use the toilet and I broke wind and the little girl smelled it. Caca smell, she said. I pretended not to smell it. But again she said, Caca smell. So I started sniffing all around, saying, Where? until the smell went away. Finally I gave up on Sami and got up and left. The traffic was terrible. I went to the offices of the magazine but no one was there. A radio was playing loudly in the street — it was a song in English about children and I realized that Muhammed Fawzi’s new song was the same song. I got on the metro and the crowds were horrendous and I almost suffocated. I looked at the faces of tired women with eyeliner running down their faces. I went to Samia’s house and found them eating. Samia smiled when she saw me and said she had waited for me for a long time before starting to eat. Really? I almost said. I asked about her boy and she said he was sleeping. I felt myself smiling. Her smile was simple and sincere. I hadn’t thought that she was so simple and so graceful.