Busayna spent the whole day blaming herself for her cruelty to him that morning when he had been in need of a word of encouragement from her as he set off for a test that she knew he had been waiting for for many years. How cruel that had been of her! What would it have hurt her to encourage him with a word and a smile? If only she had spent a little time with him! After work she found herself anxious to meet him, so she went to Tawfikiya Square and sat waiting for him on the wall of the flowerbed where they usually met each evening. Night had fallen and the square was crowded with passersby and vendors; sitting on her own she was subjected to a lot of harassment but she kept waiting for him for almost half an hour. When he didn’t come, she thought he must be angry with her because she had put him off that morning, so she got up and climbed the stairs to his room on the roof. The door was open and Taha’s mother was sitting there alone, anxiety showing on her aged face. The mother hugged her and kissed her, then sat her down next to her on the bench and said, “I’m very scared, Busayna. Taha left for the exam in the morning and still hasn’t come back. Pray God he’s all right!”
Were it not for his advanced age and the years of hardship that have left their traces on his countenance, Hagg Muhammad Azzam would look like a movie star or a crowned head, with his towering height and imperturbable gravitas, his elegance and his wealth, his face rosy with overflowing good health and his complexion all polished and shiny thanks to the skill of the experts at La Gaite Beauty Center in El Mohandiseen where he goes once a week. He owns more than a hundred suits of the most luxurious kind and wears a different one every day, with a showy necktie and elegant imported shoes.
Each day, in the middle of the morning, Hagg Azzam’s red Mercedes rolls down Suleiman Basha from the direction of the A l’Americaine with him seated in the back absorbed in telling the small amber prayer beads that never leave his hand. His day starts with an inspection of his properties — two large clothing stores, one of them opposite the A l’Americaine, the other on the ground floor of the Yacoubian Building where his office is situated; two automobile showrooms; and a number of spare parts shops in Marouf Street, not to mention a great deal of real estate in the downtown area and many other buildings that are under construction, soon to rise in the form of towering skyscrapers bearing the name Azzam Contractors. The car proceeds to stop in front of each establishment and the employees gather round it to offer the Hagg warm greetings, which he returns with a wave of his hand so restrained and insignificant that you might not notice it. The head employee or the most senior among them immediately approaches the car window, bends toward the Hagg, and briefs him on the work situation or seeks his advice on some matter. Hagg Azzam listens carefully with his head lowered, his thick eyebrows knotted, his lips pursed, then trains his narrow, gray foxy eyes (always slightly red from the effects of hashish) on the distance, as though he were watching something on the horizon. Finally he speaks, his voice deep, its intonation decisive, the words few and far between. He cannot abide chatter or disputatiousness.
Some attribute his love of silence to his application (with his strictly observant piety) of the noble hadith that says, “If one of you speaks let him be brief, or let him stay silent” — though at the same time, with his vast wealth and extraordinary influence, he does not in fact need to talk much because his word is generally final and has to be obeyed. To this should be added his wide experience of life that enables him to grasp things at a glance, for the aging millionaire, who is past sixty, started out thirty years ago as a mere migrant worker who left Sohag governorate for Cairo looking for work, and the older people on Suleiman Basha remember him sitting on the ground in the passage behind the A l’Americaine in a gallabiya, vest, and turban with a small wooden box in front of him — for that is where he started, shining shoes. He worked for a time as an office servant in the Babik office supplies store, then disappeared for more than twenty years, suddenly to reappear having made a lot of money. Hagg Azzam says that he was working in the Gulf, but the people in the street do not believe that and whisper that he was sentenced and imprisoned for dealing in drugs, which some insist he continues to do to this day, citing as evidence his exorbitant wealth, which is out of all proportion to the volume of the sales in his stores and the profits of his companies, indicating that his commercial activities are a mere front for money laundering.
Whatever the accuracy of these rumors, Hagg Azzam has become the unrivaled Big Man of Suleiman Basha and people seek him out to get their business done and settle their differences, while his influence has been consolidated recently by his joining the Patriotic Party and by his youngest son Hamdi subsequently joining the judiciary as a public prosecutor. Hagg Azzam has an overwhelming urge to buy property and shops in the downtown district specifically, as though to stress his new situation in the area that once witnessed him as a poor down-and-out.
It was about two years ago that Hagg Azzam woke to perform the dawn prayer, as was his custom, and found his nightwear wet. He was disturbed and it occurred to him that he might be sick, but when he went into the bathroom to wash, he ascertained that the cause of the wetness was a sexual urge and he remembered the distorted image of a naked, distant woman that he had seen in his dreams. This strange phenomenon in an old man like himself astonished him. He forgot about it during the busy day but it happened again several times thereafter, so that he had to bathe daily before the dawn prayer to cleanse himself of the defilement. Nor did things end there, for he caught himself several times stealing glances at the bodies of the women working for him in the store, and some of them, instinctively sensing his lust, started to walk with a deliberately provocative gait and talk coquettishly in front of him to seduce him, so that several times he was forced to scold them.
These sudden importunate sexual urges disturbed Hagg Azzam greatly, firstly because they were inappropriate to his age and secondly because he had kept to the straight and narrow all his life and believed that his uprightness and avoidance of anything that might make God angry was the main reason for all the success he had achieved — for he never drank alcohol. (As for the hashish that he smoked, many religious experts had assured him that it was merely “reprehensible” and neither created uncleanness nor was absolutely prohibited. In addition it neither took away the mental faculties nor drove man to commit indecencies or crimes as did alcohol; on the contrary, hashish calmed a man’s nerves, brought him greater equipoise, and sharpened his mind.) Likewise, the Hagg had never committed fornication in his entire life, immunizing himself, like most Sa’idis, by marrying early; also over the course of his long life he had witnessed wealthy men surrender to their lusts and lose vast fortunes.
The Hagg confided his problem to certain older friends of his and they assured him that what was happening was an ephemeral phenomenon that would soon disappear forever. “It’s just an excess of good health,” said his friend Hagg Kamil the cement trader, laughing. But the urges continued as the days passed and intensified until they became a heavy burden on his nerves and, even worse, were the cause of a number of tiffs with Hagga Salha, his wife, who was a few years younger than he but was caught unprepared by this sudden blossoming of youthfulness and then got upset because she was unable to satisfy him. More than once she rebuked him and told him that their children were grown men and that as two older spouses they ought to adorn themselves with an appropriate sedateness.