Kadem pulled me by my shirt and signaled with his head for me to follow him outside.
“Quite a bit of electricity in the air,” he said.
“Something’s snapped in Yaseen’s brain. I don’t think ten straitjackets could hold him.”
Kadem held out his pack of cigarettes.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Take one,” he insisted. “You need a change of air.”
When I gave in, I noticed that my hand was trembling. “He scares the shit out of me,” I confessed.
Kadem flicked his lighter under my cigarette before applying the flame to his own. Then, throwing back his head, he blew his smoke out into the breeze. “Yaseen’s a half-wit,” he said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing stopping him from jumping onto a bus and going to Baghdad to wage some war. That number he does is going to get tiresome after a while. It may even cause him some serious problems. Shall we go to my place?”
“Why not,” I replied.
Kadem lived with his sickly, elderly parents in a little stone house backed up against the mosque. We climbed the stairs to his quarters on the upper floor. The room was large and well lit. There was a double bed surrounded by carpets, a “Made in Taiwan” stereo set dwarfed by two gigantic speakers, a chest of drawers flanked by an oval mirror and an overstuffed chair.
In the corner nearest the door, mounted on a stiff sheepskin, stood a lute — the noblest and most mythical of musical instruments, the king of the Oriental orchestra, the instrument that could elevate its virtuosos to the rank of divinities and transform the shadiest dive into Parnassus, abode of the Muses. I knew the fantastic history of this particular lute, which had been made by Kadem’s grandfather, a peerless musician who delighted Cairo throughout the 1940s before conquering Beirut, Damascus, and Amman and becoming a living legend from the Mashriq to the Maghrib. Kadem’s grandfather played for princes and sultans, warlords and tyrants; he bewitched women and children, mistresses and lovers. It was said that he was the cause of innumerable conjugal conflicts in the uppermost circles of Arab society. And indeed, it was a jealous army captain who put five bullets in his belly while he was performing under the filtered lights of the Cleopatra, Alexandria’s trendiest nightclub, toward the end of the 1950s.
Facing the lute, as if committed to a permanent exchange of influences, was a picture in a carved frame, enshrined on the night table: a photograph of Faten, my cousin’s first wife.
“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Kadem asked as he hung his jacket on a nail.
“She was very beautiful,” I acknowledged.
“That picture has never moved from its place. Even my second wife left it where she found it. It bothered her, that’s for sure, but she proved to be very understanding about it. Only once, during the first week of our marriage, did she ever try to turn it to face the wall. She didn’t dare get undressed under that immense gaze. But then, little by little, she learned to live with it…. Tea or coffee?”
“Tea.”
“I’ll go down and get some.”
He made a sudden dash down the stairs.
I stepped closer to the picture. The young bride was wide-eyed and smiling while the wedding festivities went on behind her. Her radiant face outshone all the paper lanterns put together. I remembered when she was a young teenager and she’d leave her house to run errands with her mother; we youngsters would race all the way around the block just so we could watch her pass by. She was sublime.
Kadem returned with a tray. He put the teapot on the chest of drawers and poured two steaming glasses of tea. Then, to my surprise, he said, “I loved her the first time I saw her.” (In Kafr Karam, one never spoke of such things.) “I wasn’t yet seven years old. But even at that age, and even though I had no real prospects, I knew we were meant for each other.”
His eyes overflowed with splendid evocations as he pushed a glass in my direction. He was floating on a cloud, his brow smooth and his smile broad. “Every time I heard someone playing a lute, I thought of her. I really believe I wanted to become a musician just so I could sing about her. She was such a marvelous girl, so generous, so humble! With her at my side, I needed nothing else. She was more than I could have ever hoped for.”
A tear threatened to spill out of one eye; he quickly turned his head and pretended to adjust the lid of the teapot. “Well,” he said. “How about a little music?”
“Excellent idea,” I said approvingly, quite relieved.
He rummaged in a drawer and fished out a cassette, which he slipped into the tape player. “Listen to this,” he said.
Once again, it was Fairuz, the diva of the Arab world, performing her unforgettable song “Hand Me the Flute.”
Kadem stretched out on his bed and crossed his legs, still holding the glass of tea in one hand. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “No angel could sing better than that. Her voice is like the breath of the cosmos….”
We heard the cassette through to the end, each of us in his own private universe. Street noises and children’s squeals failed to reach us. We flew away with the violins, far, very far from Kafr Karam, far from Yaseen and his outrages. The sun shined its blessings down on us, covering us with gold. The dead woman in the photograph smiled upon us. For a second, I thought I saw her move.
Kadem rolled himself a joint and dragged on it rapturously. He was laughing in silence, beating time with one languorous hand to the singer’s unfaltering rhythm. At the beginning of a refrain, he started singing, too, thrusting out his chest. He had a magnificent voice.
After the Fairuz cassette was over, he put on others, old songs by Abdel Halim Hafez and Abdelwaheb, Ayam and Younes, Najat and other immortal glories of the tarab alarabi.
Night surprised us, completely intoxicated as we were with joints and songs.
The TV that Sayed had donated to the idle youth of Kafr Karam proved to be a poisoned chalice. It brought the village nothing but turmoil and disharmony. Many families owned a television set, but at home, with the father seated on his throne and his eldest son at his right hand, young people kept their comments to themselves. Things were different in the café. You could boo, you could argue about any subject whatsoever, and you could change your mind according to your mood. Sayed had hit the bull’s-eye. Hatred was as contagious as laughter, discussions got out of control, and a gap formed between those who went to the Safir to have fun and those who were there “to learn.” It was the latter whose point of view prevailed. We started concentrating on the national tragedy, all of us together, every step of the way. The sieges of Fallujah and Basra and the bloody raids on other cities made the crowd seethe. The insurgent attacks might horrify us for an instant, but more often than not they aroused our enthusiasm. We applauded the successful ambushes and deplored skirmishes that went wrong. The assembly’s initial delight at Saddam’s fate turned to frustration. In Yaseen’s view, the Rais, trapped like a rat, unrecognizable with his hobo’s beard and his dazed eyes, exposed triumphantly and shamelessly to the world’s cameras, represented the most grievous affront inflicted on the Iraqi people. “By humiliating him like that,” Yaseen declared, “they were holding up every Arab in the world to public opprobrium.”