Mr. Hamid Hawwas had slipped away at the beginning and called the Emergency Response Police from the telephone in the cigarette stand on the opposite side of the street and it wasn’t long before a young police officer and a number of policemen and goons took everyone involved into custody — Malak, his assistants, Abaskharon, and Ali the Driver.
Approaching the officer, Hamid Hawwas greeted him politely and said, “You’ve studied law, of course, sir. Now our friend here” — pointing to Malak — ”wants to open a commercial establishment on the roof, while the roof is a common resource that may not be exploited commercially. As you know full well, sir, this is a crime, known in legal terminology as ‘extortion of possession,’ and is punishable by imprisonment for a period of up to three years.”
“Are you a lawyer?” the officer asked Mr. Hamid, who responded confidently, “No, sir. I, sir, am Hamid Hawwas, deputy director of auditing in the National Sanitation Authority, El Mansoura Branch. Equally, I am one of the residents whose rights to the common resource of the roof have been usurped. How could the owner, my dear sir, go and rent the roof for a commercial purpose? This is a flagrant attack on the common resources of the residents. If he gets away with this, he could rent out the elevator, or the entrance to the building! Has the country gone to the dogs or what?”
Mr. Hamid Hawwas posed the last question with a theatrical flourish, looking hard at the assembled residents, who, stirred by his words, muttered in protest. Confusion appeared on the young officer’s face, and after thinking for a little he said disgustedly, “Okay, come on. Everyone to the station!”
Dr. Hassan Rasheed was a leading figure in the law in Egypt and the Arab world. Like Taha Hussein, Ali Badawi, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, and others, he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to apply what they had learned there — lock, stock, and barrel — within Egyptian academia. For people like them, “progress” and “the West” were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the great Western values — democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation’s heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved.
During his studies in Paris, Dr. Rasheed met a French woman, Jeanette, and fell in love with her. Then he brought her with him to Egypt and married her and they had their only son, Hatim. The family lived a life that was European in both form and essence. Hatim could not remember ever seeing his father pray or fast. The pipe never left his mouth, there was always French wine at his table, the most recent records from Paris resounded through the house, and French was the main language of conversation at home. In the Western manner, everything about the family’s life took place according to a set time and schedule, Dr. Rasheed even setting aside special times during each week for meeting friends and relatives and writing his personal correspondence.
The fact is that in addition to his exceptional mental capacities he possessed an astonishing appetite for uninterrupted work and was able in two decades to bring about a real blossoming of Egyptian civil law studies. With time his star rose till he assumed the deanship of the Faculty of Law at Cairo University. Then the International Law Society in Paris chose him as one of the hundred most prominent lawyers in the world.
Since Dr. Rasheed was always absorbed in his research and lecturing and because his wife Jeanette’s job as a translator at the French embassy occupied all her time, their son Hatim spent his childhood sad and lonely, to the point that in contrast to all other children he even liked school days and hated the long summer vacations, which he spent on his own with no friends to play with. And along with the painful loneliness, there were the feelings of alienation and mental confusion from which the children of mixed marriages suffer.
Little Hatim spent a lot of time with the servants, and his parents (being always busy) would often send him with one of them to the Gezira Club or the cinema. Among the many servants in the house, little Hatim was particularly fond of the steward Idris, with his flowing white caftan, broad red cummerbund and tall fez, and his tall, strong, slim body, his handsome brown face, his intelligent, bright eyes, and his beaming smile from which his gleaming, white, regular teeth shone out. It was Idris’s habit to sit with Hatim in his large room overlooking Suleiman Basha, playing with his toys with him, telling him stories about animals, singing beautiful Nubian songs to him and translating for him what they meant. Idris’s voice would tremble and the tears would glisten in his eyes when he spoke to him of his mother and his brothers and sisters and his village that they had taken him away from when he was young to go work in people’s houses. Hatim loved Idris and their relationship grew till they were spending many hours together every day, and when Idris started kissing Hatim on his face and neck and whispering, “You’re beautiful. I love you,” Hatim felt no revulsion or fear. On the contrary, the burning sensation that his friend’s breath left on his body excited him. They continued to exchange kisses until one day Idris asked him to take off his clothes. Hatim was nine at the time and felt embarrassed and confused, but in the end he gave in to the insistence of his friend. The latter was so aroused by the sight of his smooth, white body that during the encounter he sobbed with pleasure and whispered incomprehensible Nubian words. Idris, despite his lust and vigor, entered Hatim’s body gently and carefully and asked him to tell him if he felt the slightest pain. This approach was so successful that when Hatim now thinks back to that first time with Idris, the same strange, piercing sensation that he knew that day for the first time comes back to him but he cannot remember feeling any distress at all.
When Idris was finished, he turned Hatim to face him and kissed him ardently on the lips, then looked into his eyes and said, “I did that because I love you. If you love me, don’t tell anyone what happened. If you tell them, they’ll beat you and throw me out and your father may put me in prison or kill me and you’ll never see me again.”
Hatim’s relationship with Idris lasted years, until Dr. Rasheed suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage caused by overwork and his widow was obliged to get rid of many of the servants because of the expense. Idris left the house and nothing more was heard of him. His absence affected Hatim so much psychologically that that year he got a poor score in the general secondary exam. Thereafter he plunged into his tumultuous homosexual life and two years later his mother passed away.
This released him from the last constraint on his pleasures. He had inherited a solid income which along with his reasonable salary from the newspaper underwrote an opulent lifestyle. He redid the large apartment in the Yacoubian Building to liberate it from its traditional style, turning it into something closer to a Bohemian artist’s studio than the home of an established family. It was now in his power to invite lovers to share his bed for days and sometimes months at a time. Hatim had relationships with many men and left them for a variety of reasons, but his covert, sinful desire remained forever linked to Idris the steward and, as a man searches among women for the image of his first love, with whom he first became acquainted with pleasure, so Hatim sought among all other men for Idris — the rough-hewn, primitive male whom civilization had not refined, and with all the hardness, crudity, and vigor that such a man represented. He never ceased thinking about Idris and often would relive, with a delicious, burning tenderness, his feeling as he lay facedown on the floor of his room (like a little rabbit surrendering itself to its fate) following with his eyes the Persian designs drawn on the carpet as Idris’s hot, bursting body clung to his, wringing it and melting it. The strange thing was that their sexual encounters, many as they were, always ended up on the floor and they never got into the bed, a fact probably attributable to Idris’s feelings of insignificance as a servant and his psychological inability to use his master’s bed even when having sexual intercourse with him.