Voices Page 3

The joy of returning to my homeland dissipated like a dream evaporating with the shock of waking. While we were still in Alexandria, and even to some extent Cairo, this world seemed somewhat like the one we knew. The buildings and paved roads were like those we'd left behind in Paris, Nice, and Deauville. But life's daily routine differed greatly as did the people I'd left behind me in France and those I saw before me in Egypt. Although most of the people were bareheaded with neatly combed hair, some wore fezzes or turbans. They wore both native and European dress, including a number of business suits. They often bore a resemblance to

  Simone's countrymen, in spite of their brown faces and dark eyes. But the culture and spirit of the place! The difference in standards of cleanliness and mentality!

  The conduct of bureaucrats, clerks, porters and peddlers was extremely annoying, both for myself and others. I attributed this to the heat, perspiration, flies and the dust, whose particles rose up and blanketed everything they touched. But whether it was justified or not, my heart was not at peace with the pungent smells of the spices, the language of the foulmouths around us, and the general lack of grace and polish.

  I kept looking toward Simone to catch her reaction to my country and its people in her facial expressions or in her liquid eyes. But her joy over the voyage and its adventures reigned, enabling her to bear anything with the patience of a camel. I was aware that this was happening to her, in spite of my own wild craving to see my family and village, and the canal and the bridge at the village entrance, and the date palms and ancient sycamore trees. Could it all still be there? I had carried their names inside myself, and their images — misty, vague, anchorless — had piled themselves upon me and been lodged in the caverns of my distant memories, constantly twisting and torturing me when I tried to sleep, whether on the deck of a Mediterranean steamer or on a train in Europe, or at work in a mine or a restaurant, or presiding, finally, over one of my elegant shops or my famous Parisian hotel.

  Along the way, I stopped seeing any resemblance to Europe's forests, farms and rich, terraced verdure. Our car rocked back and forth in spasms, and dirt spewing

  out from beneath its wheels drifted back over us, leaving its residue on the clinging perspiration that covered us and its smell in our noses. Green trees — scrawny, scraggly, and sick-looking — lined the sides of the road along with the telephone poles, the modest farms and the canal. It bothered me that the peasants in the fields still did their work mostly with their hands, alongside their mules, cattle and water buffalo, just as it bothered me to see the villages full of low adjoining mud structures and brown faces — shrivelled, stark and wan — proclaiming their own anemia, dysentery and vitamin deficiency . . . and I said to myself:

  'So this is my country.'

  The amazing thing was that Simone was delighted by what she was seeing. The bright scorching sun, the vegetation and the primitive life all pleased her, and every so often she would cry out: 'Oh Hamid! Look! . . . What a quaint land! . . . All this water ... Is your country always flooded with sunlight even in winter. Doesn't it ever snow?'

  But she would also ask:

  'Where are the forests? Why does everyone look sick? Why don't the people use machinery in their farming? Why do the children all walk around barefoot?'

  Her questions killed me, and I kept repeating to myself,

  'This is my homeland. These are my people.'

  She would notice the embarrassment on my face and would then say to me with that famous and sensitive politeness of her people: 'Pardon, mon cheri' Then she would go back to asking questions and taking pictures.

  How I wished she had taken no pictures at all of these sights that I found so humiliating. They would neither help me nor honor me in Paris. Mais c' etait la la verite de ce pays. That's the way it is, and there's no way around it.

  We were stopped several times on the road by the police, but my knowledge of Arabic and the papers I carried from Cairo helped me greatly, my foreign accent and French passport notwithstanding. I was constantly forced to explain the reason for my travels in Egypt. At one of the stops, as we passed through a village called Kufr Shakr, Simone wanted to stop and drink something at the village's modest coffeehouse and to buy fresh fruit to eat as we sat. We turned our car around and drove back up the road a few metres, then stopped beside the road and got out. Simone washed her arms and face and we drank a couple of sodas that were barely refrigerated. The owner of the coffeehouse washed the fruit himself before we ate it. Eventually, several villagers, including women and children, formed a ring around us, as though we had just come from another planet. Then we resumed our journey.

  Along the way, I feared that she would be stricken with cramps caused by the peaches and apricots that she'd eaten, which, I was sure, had been washed with canal water. . . Or even that I myself might be stricken, if not by cramps then by dysentery. Surely, I'd never forget those ten years I'd spent here and the pain that had been a large part of it. I'd learned the reasons for these illnesses in Paris, but that didn't save me from continuing to suffer from them years later.

  When we arrived at the Adilia crossroad and I saw the

  policemen, I thought at first that there was some problem. When I realized the truth, I was irritated by the elaborate reception. Maybe it was because I was embarrassed in front of Simone for my family and for the officials, peasants and children. That was the cause of the irritation that I hid in my heart behind my broad smile, especially when I saw the happiness in Simone's face.

  Here was my brother, whom I had yearned to embrace for so long, and there was my skinny old mother, who had shrunk in height and weight over the years. I greeted them and let them kiss me. My mother hugged Simone and kissed her on both cheeks, then began feeling up her hair and arms in front of everyone, to Simone's surprise. Then she fired into the air a long, shrill and hoarse ululation that could only be stopped by a sudden hacking cough.

  This was my village: Darawish, with its low mud buildings and narrow streets as though it were in constant fear of a coming invasion, the blackness covering people's faces and coloring women's clothes; it's dried and dusty salt marshes and its piles of hay on the rooftops. This was the dream that I'd lived, been pulled by, come back for. In spite of it all, it was lodged in my heart, raging and storming, and I felt along with my irritation and disgust, a love and a peace. I thought: is Simone really pleased with what she sees, hears and smells? I asked her, and she answered, nodding her head as her eyes sparkled with a deep content: 'BeaucoupV

  But I was aware even then that this euphoria would soon disappear, leaving behind a bad taste in our mouths

  behind it, and I was annoyed to the extreme when, just before I parked the car by the coffeehouse, my brother Ahmed told me he hadn't been able to build us a house by the agricultural highway. But I gave in to the circumstances, once he'd assured me that our old home (that I remembered as being dark and gloomy and surrounded on three sides by a poor neighborhood) had been restored to a splendor that would please Simone.

  And the excitement of the people swelled all around us as though I were a conquering hero, returning victoriously from a horrible war with my car and with my European wife, Simone; and I thought, if only someone would present her with a bouquet of flowers, or even a modest green plant pulled from this noble earth.

  Ahmed Al-Bahairi

  Simone walked out of the bathroom that first morning with her wet hair dangling around her shoulders like a mermaid and went into her bedroom. My wife, Zeinab, and I had moved out of the same room a few days earlier and crowded in with my mother for the sake of our two guests of honor. Hamid then went into the bathroom and came out after a while to catch up with Simone. When they emerged from their room they were all dressed up (which amazed me since it was morning and they weren't going anywhere). Simone had on a short gray dress and Hamid wore a blue suit and necktie. Like the waiter at the Nahar Coffeehouse in the town. We had put

  our fancy plates out on the lunch table, and there was so much foo
d we could have fed the entire neighborhood. It was so much that it made Simone scream with amazement. Then she calmed down and began to chatter in her own tongue about the generosity of the East and the waste and folly of it all. I swear to God, that's what Hamid told us she was saying. I was amazed by her orders as we sat at the table: 'Soup first, then the other dishes, one after the other.' It was bizarre. She had to force her own way on the rest of us through Hamid, who translated for us what she wanted, repeating her remarks one by one, at the same time telling me that a person should eat and drink the way the people do in the country he visits.

  I tried to make Simone laugh during the lunch, but when Hamid would relay to her what I'd said in his stuffy, formal way, she would just smile and say: 'Bravo.'

  Honestly, I was embarrassed about my appearance next to Hamid's, and Zeinab's next to Simone's, and we won't even mention my mother. The village tailor had tried to cut me a cashmere suit that made me sweat buckets in that heat and over that hot bowl of soup. The seamstress, Rafraf, had also done all she could to see that my mother and wife were smartly dressed, but all her work just made them look funny.

  Every now and then, I would forget myself while drinking my soup and make a loud slurping sound, even though I myself had warned my wife and my mother about not doing just that. My mother, of course, constantly fell into this same trap. Zeinab, on the other hand, didn't forget even once and never stopped looking

  at mother and me with disapproval. She watched carefully whatever Simone did at the table and tried to do likewise, whether it was the raising of the spoon or the setting it down, or even the extent to which she opened her mouth before putting the food into it. But she really did look strange when she tried to use her knife the way Simone did, and I thought to myself that human beings just can't change their habits overnight.

  Then, when Simone stuck her arm out to stab the turkey leg with her knife, she exposed the long yellow hairs in her armpits. I felt disgusted. My wife realized what I had seen and smiled sarcastically and stared at me. I leered back at her in anger, afraid that Hamid might notice the silent conversation passing between us. It struck me that beauty can never be fully perfected, as I wondered at how Simone could neglect her bodily hygiene so much, being the civilized, elegant woman that she was, and knowing that she was going to visit her husband's family in a strange and foreign land.

  Hamid and Simone were eating in small bites and practically whispered when they spoke, so that my mother, who was hard of hearing, kept leaning her ear toward me and asking in a loud voice what they were saying. Hamid would try to raise his voice a little and answer her patiently in broken spaced-out phrases as though he were trying to search for words that he'd forgotten over the course of thirty years of exile: words that he needed me to remind him of. Now and then he would even stick a French word in in the middle of his sentences, causing my mother to open her mouth in shock, while Zeinab tried to suppress a laugh, and

  Hamid stared back at them both, equally amazed.

  We finished the meal, then Hamid and I went into the living quarter. Simone insisted on staying behind to help my mother and Zeinab and the servant we had rented for a few days to help out, to give Simone a good impression. Hamid took a small notebook from his pocket, as soon as we were alone. He asked me if any of the money he'd sent was left over, and I told him all the different things I'd spent it on. Strangely enough, he wasn't upset that it had been used up, and in fact, gave me another 100 pounds to spend while he was with us. He then settled into a long conversation in which he asked me about my work and overall situation. He wanted to know about our father's final days. Then he began asking about our relatives, family by family, and even person by person: who had been born, who had married, who had had children, who had died, who had moved away and who had stayed behind. He would ask these things, then listen to me silently writing away from the left of the page to the right, putting down numbers. I was too embarrassed to try to sneak a look. He took out his wallet again and put it in front of himself, then he pulled a long, fat, brown cigar out of a case, lit it and gave it to me. Then he pulled out another just like it which he put in his mouth and lit as he began counting out money: 'This is for so and so . . . and this is for so and so,' etc. And I said to myself, as I considered the money and cigar, that here was really a man of noble deeds who let no chance to be generous pass him by. Yes, he never forgot even a small act of kindness; but to tell the truth, I thought he was crazy because he was flinging all this money at us and rousing

  our envy. A tenth of the amount would have been enough to make our eyes bulge, since they bulged at anything that was much more than plain dirt. Besides, I was his own brother and I could have, with this money alone, bought fertilizer, rice, wheat, gasoline, seeds, cotton, fabrics . . . everything imaginable. So I decided to myself that I would carry out his instructions in my own way. After all, I understood things here better than he did, and my mother, my children and I were his closest relatives and should have been the first to gain from his spendthrift ways.

  While we sat together, my children came from their Aunt's — the three boys and the two girls — and I introduced them to him. They said hello and kissed him, and he tossed each of them five pounds and began to chat with them. With a touch of reproach he told me that the two girls had to begin going to school in the town, and I pretended to agree with him. He said I should send him a letter in Paris to tell him when any of them were about to get married and also to let him know when my oldest son was about to graduate from high school so that he could arrange for him to complete his higher education in Paris. For that I felt so obliged to him that tears began rolling down my cheeks and I thanked him deeply, calling on God to shower him with blessings, until he stopped me with a wave of his hand and the comment that it was his duty since he was my brother.

  Then my mother, Zeinab and Simone came in, and Simone screamed again when she saw my children and kissed them. She tried (foolishly) to speak to them, but, of course, they didn't understand. I started to feel their

  visit had gone on long enough, so I motioned to them with my eyes to leave. Simone caught what I'd done and seemed to me to disapprove, but the children, who usually do what I say, got up and said goodbye anyway and left to go back to their Aunt's. I excused myself for a moment as well, then went out behind them and took away the money they'd been given. Of course, I did this so they wouldn't lose it, or give it to Zeinab who might take it on some pretext. But I warned them anyway not to say anything to their Aunt about the money before I went back to the living quarter.

  Our visit went on a while longer until I noticed Simone caressing Hamid's hair, and I thought to myself that she probably wanted him, right then. My mother was staring and laughing, while Zeinab stole glances in their direction, and I worried that one of them might do something improper. So I got up and excused myself, taking with me my mother and Zeinab, and Hamid accompanied his wife to their room so they could both rest a little.

  I found myself wanting Zeinab, even after such a heavy meal. But my mother, whom we'd been sharing a room with for the past two weeks, didn't catch on. Eventually, we managed to lure her up to the roof to feed and look after the chickens until sunset.

  It never occurred to me that as my pleasure with Zeinab rose I would feel as though I was holding Simone tightly in my arms, and I noticed that Zeinab also was meeting me with a passion I hadn't seen in years.

  The Omda

  I had prepared an unforgettable evening. We laid down rugs on the balcony, in the reception parlor and in the guest hall and mats in the courtyard. We'd hung dozens of lamps which lit up the residence at night as though we were in the middle of the afternoon. The furniture shop in the town had supplied the entire place with the finest articles. The walls were lined with tapestries embroidered by the tent maker, and more furniture and mats in the courtyard had been added, as were trays, plates and silverware, and generally everything required for an evening of high culture, the like of which had never occu
rred in our district.

  Then we all waited: the Maamur, the town elders, the officers, the elders of Darawish and myself. Simone, Ahmed, and his brother Hamid arrived together. Her appearance pleased me as a red blooded male, but angered me as a gentleman. Her back was bare down to below her shoulders. Her hair hung down over her long neck that looked like a gazelle's. Her two breasts stood firm and round with the cleavage between them disgracefully exposed. She wore a short red dress cut above her knees which made all the young men, who'd gathered outside the hall from Darawish and all the surrounding area, cheer like crazy people. I thought to myself she would surely corrupt them and end up charming us away from our black-clad women and our modest and virtuous young girls.

  But what could one do? That's the way things were in her country, and one must finish what one starts. After all, she was a guest and the wife of one of Darawish's native sons, even if the scene made me look down on Hamid himself and lowered him in my esteem, causing me to whisper to myself secretly: 'Shameless bastard.'

  Of course, Simone was the only woman in the room except for the belly dancer; after all, what villager would bring his wife to such a place? No one from the town — neither the Maamur, the officers, the Town Doctor, the Agricultural Engineer, nor the Inspector of Supplies — brought theirs. We all sat at one table and all the elders sat at the tables around us. (The Maamur himself had arranged the seating.) He seated Simone at the head of the table with himself on her immediate left directly across from her husband, while I sat facing Simone at

  the other end of the table. But when I tried to tease him about sitting next to her he just said:

  'It's all by rank, Mr Omda.'

  Loud noises came in from outside the hall as the watchmen and soldiers armed with nightsticks faced a crowd of women, children and youngsters all enchanted by Simone. A store in town had solved our silverware problem by providing us with large packages of knives and forks so that we didn't fall into the same trap as Ahmed Al-Bahairi had done when he realized, as he prepared for their arrival, that there wasn't a single fork in all of Darawish. Simone, of course, started to eat with her knife and fork with the utmost skill, never injuring herself once with the teeth of the fork or with that sharp knife blade that could slice a piece of meat in two at a mere touch. Hamid did likewise and the Maamur, officers, Doctor and Engineer followed suit.