I could have called this story "Romeo and Juliet" for Omar was a Romeo. In Cairo where we grew up, a Romeo was a lady's man. And perhaps Omar was more of that than Romeo himself. Juliet was neither a Capulet nor was she from Verona. She was an attractive English girl and her story was never as passionate as her namesake's nor, certainly, as tragic. I was at school with Omar for many years and as we grew up, I lived my romantic fantasies through his love affairs. We were close and he confided in me and I was always ready with my advice. He usually heard me out and sometimes he took it and sometimes not. I was his Cyrano de Bergerac and in place of his ugliness and monstrous nose, I had my shyness and timidity. I analyzed situations, plotted strategies and suggested optimum moves for Omar's love affairs and, sometimes like him, like Cyrano, I was in love with the girl whose seduction I meticulously planned.
But then again, I could have called this story "Omar, Juliet and George" for I was always there. Or even "Omar and George" for until he met Juliet I was the one constant in his life. The girls came and went. I was steadfastly present. Ever since our school days in Cairo. And later in London where we pursued our higher education.
Friendship is a sort of marriage of convenience without the sex but with affinity of character, companionship and sometimes feelings of tenderness. It cannot be one sided. One takes from it the emotional support one needs from another human being and returns it as selflessly and as generously as one can. Even a marriage of convenience needs a minimum of generosity to survive. Friendship does so by definition.
He was my sex educator. At our English School we were together five days a week in the mornings and afternoons and usually on Saturdays, as well, for sports. We were in the same form. The "B" stream all along. Not with the "A"s, the super bright ones. But Omar was a good athlete and that counted for more. The 'swots' were held in contempt. He also had a dashing older brother, an equally fine athlete and heartthrob and obviously a role model for Omar to follow. So Omar started early on, in the Cairo of the late fifties, to have girlfriends and to experiment with sex. Well, admittedly, not much sex in those days. But it was a start to become familiar and comfortable with the opposite sex, to lose one's shyness and reserve and to learn to push on further and further in the delightful game that is central to our life and vital to our existence. To become a 'hunter' in Cyrano's terminology.
One, of course, does eventually go through the processes of life. Does get married and make love to a woman and begets children but an early start and youthful experience makes for a happier, more normal married life with fewer regrets of something missed. Of a need to compensate for this deficiency; the need to be intimate and taste more than just the woman you married. Contrary to the perverse teachings of most religions, sexual experience for both sexes before the formation of a family seems to me crucial. Religions are born in the minds of men and one wonders how they ever managed to reach such arbitrary, unreasonable and irrational ideals, which are enforced in the name of God. Happily, most humans are sinners, at least in the religious-sexual context, and so a measure of normality exists in our society and we are not all Talibans. The west has almost attained a culture of sexual equality and 33
sexual freedom. It is not yet complete and the problems generated in its wake are many: a soaring divorce rate, alienated families. . .etc, which seem to contradict my viewpoint. But, I believe, this is only the evolution of change, the red-hot reaction before the compromises and settlement of the struggle. Before the elimination of extremes and the acceptance and adjustment to a new functional mode of a true sexual democracy.
But I am straying from my narrative. As I said, Omar was my sex educator. In the days when sex was hush-hush, when books of sexual instruction were non-existent, when a few fellow students were expelled from our school for possessing a magazine called Gala with bikini clad buxom ladies and not a nipple showing. Our only information on sex were the dirty jokes that circulated in school, the boasting of older boys who resorted to prostitutes and, for me, the intimate confessions of Omar about the parties he went to, the girls he kissed and the lengths he went to with his latest girlfriend. Hence my abysmal ignorance on sex. I was too shy even to ask questions, too proud and wary of ridicule to exhibit my lack of knowledge. I arrived at my first sexual encounter without knowing what the female genitals looked like.
But at least I was told how to kiss. I remember Omar's instructions, "When you put your lips on her lips, she will open her mouth slightly. Pass the tip of your tongue past her lips and she will probably do the same. Make your tongue hard and pointed because a soft, wide tongue can be revolting. And when you will feel her tongue you can pass yours back and forth, left and right, to play with hers. I am sure you shall like it very much." I cannot possibly forget this piece of advice I received nearly half a century ago for it stuck in my mind that a soft, wide tongue in your mouth can be revolting. That I never found it so is beside the point.
In our last form in Cairo Omar had an English girl called Sue and he used to strip her to the waist and 'fiddle' her breasts. One day, as we were walking in the streets of Heliopolis, he looked at the full moon and told me, "Ah, Sue has her period starting today. It starts every new full moon." I was mystified. It was years later that I found out that women and the moon have a twenty-eight day monthly cycle. Sue was a pretty and well-developed girl and his descriptions of their love play were my early teenage equivalent of pornography. They thrilled me and kept me dreaming.
It was in London that my role as a confessor and advisor on his romantic affairs came into its own. I came to London a year after Omar but our friendship picked up where it left off in Cairo. We were always in close proximity. We always rented rooms close to each other and at one time in the same rooming house. I had many other friends from school studying there as well and I did not neglect them but Omar had this special place in my heart.
He was the epitome of Cyrano's hunter, plunging into new adventures with a single-mindedness that was both entertaining and tiresome. You could not walk the street without having him chat or pick conversations with the girls around him. Could not go on an errand with him without ending up at a coffee bar chatting up a girl. His appointments with them were confusing and overlapping and a great many were missed. And of course all this frenzied activity distracted him from his studies. He was not exceptionally bright. Well, average, just like me and even in those days to go to university in England, to manage to get accepted required high marks at the GCE
Advanced Level. This could only be achieved through hard work and systematic study.
The year I joined him in London we both studied for our Advanced Level and sent out applications to the universities. Omar had an English mother, blond European looks and a winning personality. He must have charmed his interviewer at Imperial 34
College who gave him a conditional acceptance to this most prestigious institution as long as he passed the minimum entrance requirements, which meant just passing grades, not high marks. Omar kept this a secret even from me. Perhaps he believed in the evil eye, a nonsense concept that perversely seems to hold true. In his case, the evil eye could only have been his own for he failed in his exams and went into hibernation. Such was his disappointment and shock that he started sleeping non-stop day and night, consuming a little food and drinking some tea in the few half hour intervals between his slumbers. After about ten days, I started getting worried and little by little forced him to get up and go out with me for a meal or a coffee. And, of course the pretty female population of South Kensington perked him up. Probably more than anything else it was this that made him realize that it was not the end of the world and soon enough he resumed his old habits.
All this chasing about, which I am tempted to call indiscriminate, did not preclude the inclusion of some real dolls in his vast, mixed-bag female pageant. It did not stop him falling in love as well. He was indeed gentle and human and he was hard hit three times. First, with a German au pair girl during the first year, before my arrival. The pictures he showed me were of a pretty but quite unexceptional girl.
When she left, he traveled a few times to Germany to see her but eventually distance and available substitutes cooled the passion and her memory receded in the mists of time. The second coup de foudre was a beautiful, gorgeous, tall, blond Swedish girl called Birgitta and the third was Juliet. Juliet could not be compared to Birgitta but then the needs of a person in his partner are not exclusively or even principally comprised of physical perfection. Oh, they are. They turn your mind and make your heart ache but sometimes that is not enough. What touches the human heart defies definition.
A year later, Omar entered a lesser college to study structural engineering and I managed to enroll in a degree course for economics. Our life in London was not luxurious but it was comfortable, pleasant and apart from the responsibility we felt for our studies, it was comparatively carefree. We were close but not stuck to one another. Our interests differed and so did our recreations. Omar had his girls, I had my books, theatre, music, ballet and my other school friends from Cairo who were also studying in London and whom I saw quite often. With Omar we met frequently for dinner though he was a health food addict and often cooked at home wholesome thick steaks and boiled potatoes to be followed by a banana milkshake. He wanted his food to have plenty of 'goodness' in it. So, such and such a food had goodness whereas this and that had no goodness in them. He catalogued and defined the various dishes according to the goodness they possessed.
That first year I did not get involved with girls. I was still a virgin and a natural reserve and timidity prevented me from forming relationships even though the opportunities were there. I sort of lived in Omar's shadow and fed on his sexual adventures, which he usually recounted to me in detail. I also met most of his girls and there was usually a friendly rapport between them and me. I often wondered and worried what would happen if I found myself in a situation with a woman which wanted and expected to be made love to. At eighteen I had never even kissed a girl. It was a problem which preoccupied me more and more.
In my second and third year I lived with Omar in the same rooming house on a wide but calm residential street in South Kensington called Queensgate. It was an upper class, expensive area that had a number of old fashioned hotels with a clientele of genteel older people and other buildings mostly of private apartments. It was a typical London street lined with trees and the same old Victorian buildings, 35
practically identical inside and out, which seemed to have been built using one single architectural design. Strangely, it is not monotonous. It gives London a quaint and picturesque aspect with a quality of seriousness and austerity. Our own building was partitioned inside for a maximum number of rooms and this meant cramped living quarters. We lived right next to each other, on the same floor. It was a happy time with increased intimacy, an obvious compatibility and mutual tolerance.
We shared happy moments and shared our miseries, which, in any case were never very serious. I remember one such occasion when my funds were late in coming and I was constantly borrowing money from Omar until we had so little left that our only meals were home-made spaghetti with grated cheese. After a week of this diet we felt so weak we could not climb the stairs to our rooms without panting. But not a beep of complaint from Omar. Then, another time, I tried my hand at writing a novel and I often read excerpts to him and he was always wildly enthusiastic for the drivel I was writing. When I eventually tore it all up he was very disappointed. He had already elevated me to the status of an accomplished author. The fact that he never read anything other than his college maths and structural mechanics hardly certified him as a reliable literary critic.
Not once did we quarrel in those days despite the fact that I constantly tried to reign in his escapades and try to make him study harder. I was of course aware of all the comings and goings of girls and met most of them in pre and post coital moments in his room for he always called me in for introductions. He tried desperately to encourage me to meet girls and very often told me that if I ever liked any one of the girls to just tell him and he would gently fade out while doing his best to get us two together. It never happened. In any case, not in that particular way. Not at my request.
It did show his friendly solidarity and concern for me, if also something of the male chauvinist who considers his girls as playthings. But one must not take this seriously.
It was of our age and then despite his flitting from flower to flower, he was always pleasant and polite with them, never ever treating them badly. A little carelessly, yes, but never intentionally so. Never contemptuously, either. The word, bitch, never crossed his lips as it constantly did with other boys I knew.
A girl called Coral was a landmark in my life. I often felt sorry for her for she was one of the ironies of nature. If I believed in a personal God I would have thought him cruel. On nature you cannot assign responsibility. It depends on the working of chance, the permutations and combinations of genes. An ugly, deformed person you can accept. Coral was not ugly or deformed. She was just so unfairly treated by nature. She had a truly beautiful face, a plump lumpy body and legs that were particularly shapeless and fat from knee to ankle. Her face was the face of a star.
Beautiful large eyes, delicate features and a milky-white, perfect complexion. Her body just ruined her. Never gave that face a chance. Well, she crossed Omar's path and ended in his bed and I got to know her because for a few days she was in and out of his room. She was from Wales and worked as a secretary in a nearby office. So she used to drop in unannounced after work and if Omar was not in his room she knocked on my door and I always offered her a cup of tea or coffee and a pleasant chat. Omar told me that in lovemaking she was insatiable. Could not get enough of it. Was always pressing him for more. I suppose to a hardened womanizer it was too much of a good thing. To me it sounded ideal.
For a few days we formed a trio and had lunches and coffees with Coral and in the evenings she slept with Omar, sometimes spending the whole night in his room.
On one such occasion Omar knocked at my door in the middle of the night. I woke up 36
startled and opened the door to find him smiling in his pajamas and disheveled hair.
The conversation that followed was something like this: Hey, what the hell's wrong Omar?
My God, George, she's going to kill me.
Who, for heavens' sake?
Coral. She can't get enough of it and I'm pooped.
So?
So I told her I couldn't go on. I wanted to sleep. But she kept on kissing me.
So?
So I told her I was out but if she wanted, I could call you to take over.
Take over, what?
Make love to her, you nit.
You're mad!
And she said, yes.
You're absolutely crazy.
Come on don't fuss. This is your chance for God's sake. Offered on a platter.
After a heated, whispered argument I thought twice about it and appreciated the logic of the proposal. Omar entered my room, burrowed in my bed and was probably asleep even before I picked up the courage to enter his room. But I did, finally, and in the light of a small bedside lamp, I found Coral naked in bed, bundled in the sheets and blankets. She smiled and said hello. I smiled back and said hello and with a thumping heart took off my pajamas and underwear and slipped under the bedcovers beside her. It was nice and warm and her body was like a hot-water bottle.
About as exciting. I snuggled in her arms and we kissed but I was worried because I was not in the least aroused. I caressed her a little and held her small, very soft breasts and they left me totally indifferent. I tried caressing her genitals but it was somehow apparent that she did not want to be touched there though she said, "Thank you, darling." And she never held me or caressed me intimately. Consequently my virginity remained intact that night because after further fruitless exertion we gave up and slept. She was extremely nice about it considering she was in the mood for better things. „Don't worry,‟ she told me, „it often happens the first time. We'll try again tomorrow and I'll give you plenty of practice.‟ She was back the next day after work and that time I had an erection and we made love. I had finally overcome my phobia and made love to Coral many more times until finally our lukewarm flirtation cooled off and we stopped seeing each other.
It was in our Queensgate lodgings that Omar met Birgitta. After Coral and a few other Corals. We were both attending our respective colleges and trying to study in our tiny rooms with varying degrees of success. I was working on my hopeless novel as well, whilst diffidently looking around for an opportunity to put into renewed practice my newfound sexual expertise. I met an English girl called Diana and we went to a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, together. We had a few laughs at the colourful nightmares of the Spanish genius and then went to a movie. I saw her a few times after that and then quietly dropped her. She was perfect for me. I really do not know why I do these things. A minor detail sometimes puts me off. Anyway, I slid into a long period of celibacy after that while Omar was busy falling in love with Birgitta.
Sometimes one wonders why girls like Birgitta never find their way. I mean Omar was a good-looking young man, he was engaging, charming, virile and girls found him attractive. But he was a student and would remain a student for a few more years with limited financial means. Birgitta was meant for better things, a more 37
sophisticated lifestyle. Omar met her while visiting the director of the Misrair offices in London, who was a former pilot and comrade-in-arms of Omar's father. She worked as a ground hostess for the airline. Well, their eyes met and, Omar being Omar, the inevitable happened. He chatted her up; he joked with her, amused her, and asked her for a date. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And, indeed, from that first date to his bed was a straight line. So was Omar's tumble in love with Birgitta. Straight as the crow flies. And who can blame him? One could only wish he had been in his shoes. For Birgitta was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that dazzles us people from the Middle East. She was a natural blond, milky-white skinned, tall, perfectly built, and intelligent, with a luminous smile. She was glamorous, too. Beautiful and glamorous. Beauty stabs at my heart, thoroughly agitates and disturbs my brain cells and for a long while I cannot think of anything else. But beauty can be subtle. Sometimes one has to look twice to discover it.
Glamour is loud, obvious and instant. It is enchanting, alluring and magic. And for timid people like me, intimidating.
Birgitta entered our lives with a bang, sweeping poor Omar off his feet and even captivating a good part of my thoughts. I loved to see her and feast my eyes on her. To look at her face and, individually, at the parts that formed that bewitching whole. The eyes, blue of course, large, doll-like emanating an aura of blueness, the nose, the mouth, the smile with one tooth slightly displaced, giving it a special charm all its own. To look at her body, the breasts and perfect legs. I could not get enough of her but Omar was not obliging. Gone were the coffees à trois which I shared with him and his other girlfriends. The lunches we had together. The long conversations in his room. Omar had no longer any time to spare for anyone else. He still attended regularly his college lectures but apart of that he had time only for Birgitta.
He stopped working at home almost completely and that worried me considerably but I did not find the opportunity for a serious talk to try to pull him back to his senses. In any case, I would have almost certainly failed in that endeavor.
About a month later, a larger room was vacated on the floor above us and Omar announced to me that he was moving in it with Birgitta. I told him that if he made that move he would, without a doubt, fail his exams that year at college. My warning went in through one ear and out the other. I could not blame him. I would have done the same thing. And, of course, Omar failed his exams and had to repeat the year.
I left Queensgate for a larger and more comfortable room soon after Birgitta moved in with Omar. In any case I saw very little of him in those last few months and hardly at all after I left though I lived quite close by. We kept in touch mostly by telephone. I stayed in the new rooming house at 3, Wetherby Gardens for the next two years until I completed my courses and left London for Cairo. Some Egyptian and Greek boys from school also rented rooms in that building and that made for a pleasant and companionable household. While there, I had a few affairs and although I was certainly never a Romeo, I did gain some experience and confidence in sexual matters.
Omar repeated the year and sometime in the middle of it he split with Birgitta.
I suspect it was she that called it quits. I do not recall the reason for the separation. I do not even recall if he did give me a reason thus terminating my claims of being his confessor and adviser. He was particularly reticent in talking to me about her because I disapproved of the way he neglected his studies and also because my prediction of his college failure had come true. Undoubtedly, there was a break in our intimacy during that period of his life. He, also, moved out of the Queensgate room as soon as Birgitta left. It was a large room and far too expensive to keep on his own. We 38
resumed more regular contact when he settled in a new house nearby. I like to think I was a good influence in his life because I always urged him to study seriously and he did start working much harder when he was once again unattached.
One day, he told me he saw Birgitta by chance and she asked him to tell me that if I invited her out on a date she would probably accept. That was a coquettishly worded proposal and it was not as chancy as it was made to sound. She did want to be asked. But I have a bizarre, self-destructive streak in my character that sometimes emerges in situations like these. "She can fuck off," I told him. "She's in for a long wait." Now, in my reminiscences, when I bring back my life and am glad for some things I did but am full of regrets for most, I realize how inadequate and intimidated I felt at her proposal. Scared I would not be up to her, would not be able to captivate her, and would fall hopelessly in love with her. Thus, the unnecessarily irritated rejoinder. She was way far too good for me and I hated her for putting me in that predicament.
Omar never ceased being my sex educator. He must have been a very good lover, for Birgitta despite their separation would often visit him at night for sex, which Omar willingly provided. I am sure he was still very much taken by her and these visits kept the wound of separation festering. In his anguish he invented the most kinky and perverse sexual postures and practices and experimented with them on her.
Of these he kept me fully informed and the details never ceased to astound me. I was informed about a multitude of acrobatic positions, oral sex, annilingus and anal sex, sex with ropes and being tied up, years before reading the Kama Sutra, years before kinky sex became practically part of our everyday general knowledge.
Sex with Omar was a drug, a narcotic that hooked Birgitta and she could not easily give it up. It was also a weird period in Omar's life and I do not know how satisfying or distressing it was. But she did break with him eventually. She met another Egyptian young man who was studying English Literature in London, married him, and left with him for Egypt. I met them a few years later at a mutual acquaintance's house in Cairo and Birgitta, still as beautiful and glamorous as ever, seemed happy and in love with her husband who was now a professor of English at Cairo University. "He never stops correcting my English," she told me with a smile.
Now and then when I traveled abroad, I chanced to meet her at the Cairo airport where she had transferred to her old job as a ground hostess for Misrair. She had retained her looks and her body was as slim as it used to be and she had acquired a new maturity that is so appealing in some women.
The After Birgitta period in Omar's life was unusually subdued. He did pick up his college work to some extent and flirted around with an English girl next door but for once he did not get his way. She was aware of the nocturnal comings and goings of Birgitta and though she enticed him with kisses and caresses, she would not go all the way. Sometime later, when Birgitta was finally gone and the girl next door given up as a bad job, the Romeo met his Juliet. I did not meet her straight away but he told me he met a special girl from the moneyed English upper classes and was wooing her in a more conventional manner. Not in the usual rush, rush, rush for the bed. It was an unusual week or ten days of dinners and the movies and dancing and then of course they made love and became a couple, steady and exclusive.
The chemistry of love is perplexing. There was no overriding reason why a Romeo like Omar should have fallen so hard for Juliet. I cannot believe it was the money. We were not brought up that way. Perhaps unfortunately so, because in my case, my lukewarm, less than avid chase of it led to many difficulties later in my life. I supposed it was the same with Omar but I could not be totally certain. Juliet was 39
sweet but nothing special. A pretty, typically English upper class girl. With the mannerisms and accents of her class but not as la-di-dah as some of her girlfriends.
She had a minor speech defect which caused her to pronounce her S slightly as a Sh.
But this did not ridicule her; it made her rather more endearing.
Oh, I liked her well enough. She was tall and slim with nice legs and prominent breasts. She was pleasant looking with a big mouth, lovely white teeth and a ready attractive smile. Her complexion English-white, unblemished and perfect and her hair, brown, long and gently curly. Yes, she would have suited me fine. And I was more than unkind to say she was nothing special. Everybody is special when you get to know them and Juliet grew on you. She was slightly younger than us, gay and light-hearted and unlike Birgitta, I saw more of her. Omar did not keep her out of sight. In fact, he kept asking me to join them at dinners and lunches and the small excursions to the countryside they set out on in her small Mini Cooper. So I decided that the saying, familiarity breeds contempt, is not always true. It often is, but with Juliet, familiarity bred affection and I think the feelings were mutual.
Unlike the Verona couple, our Romeo's relationship with Juliet was steady and calm. It did not consume him like his previous love affair. He devoted time to his studies and successfully passed his college exams that year. I, too, managed to scrape through mine and returned to Cairo for the summer and back again, three months later, to London for my final year. I was happy to see Omar and Juliet were still together, calm and contented and I marveled that such an ordinary girl was able to tame her oversexed Romeo. The year went by pleasantly with no more and no less excitement than before. I fell in and out of love with a petite Italian girl, read a lot, s