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LETTERS TO DR. FATTHI
and other Secrets
“Wake up ya khawaga Baul. It‟s already ten. Dr Fatthi will see you soon.”
“Paul, Amina, Paul. Not Baul.”
She makes an effort. “B…b...Paul.”
She laughs merrily.
“Give us a bossa, Amina, a kiss.”
“For shame, behave yourself.”
She bends, nevertheless, over my bed for my ritual awakening. I offer my cheek.
She is wary. She knows the routine. As her face approaches I grab her, pull her on the bed and try to kiss her lips. I rarely succeed. She pushes me away and slaps my hands, my body but not a peep. She does not want anyone to know. She stands and pulls the bedcovers off me.
“Now, get up,” she says and hurries out.
She is a lovely girl, this Amina. She brightens my life in this dreary place. Her twinkling, playful eyes, her smile of pure sugar on a large mouth with perfect teeth, her stiff frizzy hair I sometimes caress and sometimes pull lightly, mischievously, to annoy her. Her defense, the little slaps she gives me. She enjoys it as much as I do. And the rest of her, well-built, petite, oozing sensuality as she moves in her white uniform and traditional white clinic slippers. She could not be anything but the lovely light milk-chocolate color she was. A little fairer, a little darker, would have been a loss. She could be anything between twenty and thirty. Coquettishly, she will not tell.
“Stay!” I cry as the door closes.
“Balash dala’a, ” she shoots back. Stop this dalliance.
I get up, wash, shave and dress. At the refectory I have some tepid tea and the leftover bread and cheese from early breakfast. I am hungry. I do not complain. I hurry to the office for my daily half-hour. I enter it. Spacious, airy with two large, open windows and lazily fluttering curtains matching the beige-colored walls. A garden outside and the chirping of birds. His desk, lovely, old fashioned, meticulously polished with curved legs, clawed at the bottom, resting on a beige moquette. A large mahogany bookcase taking up the whole wall opposite the windows, with impeccably bound volumes that seemed to be there for decorative purposes, never used, and over the desk four, framed, highly official-looking diplomas. How dull, I thought every time I entered. Not a single painting. I sat on one of the two matching, comfortable armchairs.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Quite well, thank you.”
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“I can see that. Do you want to leave?”
“No.”
“Give it a try.”
“Not yet.”
We talked a while.
“Listen,” he said. “I was thinking you should start writing.” I looked at him. My headshrinker. He was nice, large and substantial; a pleasant face, a seductive smile, grey, balding, still young and vigorous at fifty.
“Write what?”
“Anything. Fiction, an event that marked you, a sexual fantasy, a viewpoint you believe in. It might help.”
“You or me?”
“Perhaps both of us.”
“So you intend to read what I write.”
“Yes, of course. If you don‟t mind.”
“If I know you shall, I might not be totally frank and uninhibited. Or I might lie.”
“Please yourself. I am here to help and you, to be helped.”
“Oh God, you know my life inside out. What more do you want? And then, I have been reading lately of the new discoveries. Are you up to date? Psychoanalysis is being outmoded.”
He smiled. His smile, benign, charming. His white gown spotless and well pressed. Did he have to wear it? Our mental maladies are neither contagious nor soiled.
Perhaps he considered it a necessary scepter of his authority.
“I don‟t like intelligent patients,” he said. “They are complicated and complicating.”
“I am not intelligent. These are things I read.”
“Such as?”
“That perhaps my depressions are due to an imbalance of the minute amounts of chemicals that regulate our mental functions and dictate our behavior. It is both strange and appalling to think that carbon and phosphorus and calcium, oxidation and chemical combinations determine whether a man will be a criminal, a bully, a genius or a mouse.
Whether he shall be gay, in both senses, or dull or schizophrenic. It seems harebrained to have had to decipher Rorschach blots and answer silly questions when all that is wrong with me is a missing chemical or an excess of one.”
“Thank you for qualifying my questions as silly,” he said smiling.
“I‟m sorry. I did not mean to belittle your competence.”
“The brain, Paul, is the most complex structure in the universe. It consists of trillions of organic cells, minuscule amounts of chemicals and barely detectable electric currents. We, well, not I but researchers, have only just started understanding and mapping its physical functioning. Freud, Yung and Adler and all the pioneers of psychotherapy built up their theories on the evidence of behavioral manifestations of the human being with what limited medical knowledge they possessed and their tremendous insight. They left us the remarkable legacy of psychoanalysis with which to work and they themselves did manage to help a great number of patients. Science does not stop and, of course, we are daily bombarded with new research, new theories and new drugs. I try to keep up, my friend, even if at times I feel my profession speeding too swiftly past 167
me. I attend conferences and try to keep abreast but basically I am a middle-of-the-roader. I battle on with the old war-horse psychoanalysis plus the new wonder drugs coming out. I do not usually justify myself to my patients but I feel I have to alleviate your worries and forgive me if I sound schoolmasterish and repeat things you probably already know.”
“So now, you want me to write.”
“Yes. And you know why? Because with you, psychoanalysis has been only marginally successful. I ask you my silly questions, as you call them, and you skim on the surface. You bounce off them and bounce them off you. I cannot get my teeth on anything substantial to build on, to start a discussion, to find a cause, to figure out a remedy. And that is a pity because there is an almost creative beauty, an intellectual challenge, an imaginative expansion in psychoanalysis. One can practically psychoanalyze oneself.”
“Easier said than done. I have been psychoanalyzing myself for years. I know most of my failings but I have yet to cure myself. When the depression strikes, I am lost.”
“Of course. I never meant to imply that one can cure oneself. A depressed person will not be magically cured even if all his problems are suddenly solved because the factors that contributed to the depression have had their physical toll in the brain and they cannot be suddenly undone. A clinical depression is a chemical imbalance of the transmitters in the brain and we have known that from the fifties but it is not just that.
There are causes that contribute to that state. Stress is one of them, anxiety, heredity and a whole complex of psychological factors and the development of one‟s personality. In fact even at present we are not clear which are the causes and which the effects.”
“So the mental and the physical intimately react one on the other?”
“Absolutely. And that‟s why the treatment of depression is a combination of medication and psychotherapy.”
“In my case, according to you, medication is working well whereas psychoanalysis is peripheral.”
“You do not open up. Luckily in clinical depressions psychoanalysis is not that vital.”
“I cannot open my psyche to you. You are a friend. You know my other friends, my wife.”
“But I am a doctor, Paul. A confessor. I told you this at the very beginning. I do not talk about my patients even to Nazli. Even when she asks.” I looked at him. Much as I liked him, he could either be my friend or my doctor.
Not both. That would have been too difficult. So far, with my evasiveness I had kept him as a friend. Now with this writing he was asking from me, perhaps, he would become my doctor. I could not decide which was best.
He broke the brief silence.
“When all is said and done,” he said, “you are much, much better. Almost fit, I should say. Those new antidepressants I have been prescribing are remarkable. We have left Dr Freud in our wake. I am surprised you do not want to leave the clinic.”
“A few days more. Or perhaps a few weeks.”
“It‟s costing you a lot of money. Or your wife in any case.”
“She has enough and much of it is mine. Was mine. It‟s money well spent. She‟s happy. I‟m happy. Away from each other.”
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“Write to me about it.”
“A letter a day to keep the doctor away?”
“Just so.”
“I may be forfeiting a friend.”
“Not necessarily. Besides being your doctor, I shall always be your friend.” We talked a few minutes longer. Nothing earth-shaking. His message was that I was well enough to leave the clinic. I got up to leave. Other patients were waiting in line.
“Give my love to Nazli,” I said.
“She sends you hers, I forgot to tell you.”
“At home, who psychoanalyzes whom?”
He laughed.
“Oh definitely, at home, I am the nut.”
I left the office and walked to the lobby of the clinic saying good morning to the nurses and orderlies and a few patients walking by in their pajamas and fancy robes de chambre. They seemed fine but one can never tell. I seemed fine, too.
I passed Amina. She ignored me.
“Please, Miss,” I called.
She stopped and smiled. She expected a little teasing.
“Thank you,” I told her.
“What for?” she asked.
“For the lovely smile.”
She pretended to be exasperated and moved on.
“Oh, Miss?”
She stopped again.
“Is set Marian awake?”
“Not yet. You know she wakes up just before lunchtime.” She moved off again hurriedly and I left the clinic through the main entrance and into the large garden. Abdou, the gardener, in his filthy galabieh was spraying torrents of water on the green lawn with a huge black hose, splashing about on his bare feet.
Resilient Egyptian roses and marguerites seemed to survive the flood. Little sparrows quenched their thirst and took their daily bath in puddles in far corners. So did my shoes on the limestone tiled pathway to the garden gate.
“Sabah el Kheir, ya Abdou, good morning, I shall use your bike for a while.” He smiled with pleasure at the honor.
“By all means, ya Bey.”
I took the bicycle and cycled slowly off. Helwan was changing. Like the rest of Egypt. Not for the better. Not for us privileged people. I knew the tiny town well. My father rented a house here, long ago, so that my mother, who had severe lumbago pains, would take daily baths at the Cabritage, a sulphurous spa with a horrid, putrid smell extending far beyond the immediate vicinity of the sanitarium. The town was quiet and drowsy in those days and when a car passed by occasionally, people stood and stared. A place of small, neat villas, by no means luxurious, where better-off retirees chose to spend their last peaceful days on this earth. It was now almost bulging at the seams, steadily becoming more and more crowded, dirty and grimy.
A few miles south, at Tibbin, a new industrial area was being developed with the National Iron and Steel works, a coke manufacturing plant which processed coal powder 169
from Poland and Russia, steel pipe factories, a motor car assembly plant and other huge projects which were meant to turn Egypt into a self-sufficient industrial power. The black and yellow haze of pollution moved with the wind, sometimes to the desert and sometimes choking Helwan. Rows and rows of ungainly, cheap apartment buildings were built on the fringes of the town, in the desert, looking more like prison gulags than residential houses. With balconies chock-full of washed laundry, the sanitary pipes leaking staining the walls and sewerage forming puddles and tiny ponds between one building and the next. Graffiti was scratched and smeared with paint on every wall with Allahu Akbar proliferating and entrances and staircases broken and dilapidated as if on purpose, inspired, it seemed, by a perverse desire to match the interiors of the building with the depressing exteriors. Not a single tree planted, or a garden or a lawn planned for the unfortunate children that were produced in droves to a life of predictable misery.
Each born with his divine providence, his fate and luck prescribed at birth, as the Muslim religion affirms. God‟s clemency was their unawareness of anything better.
I cycled to the railway station which was in the town center. The station a typical colonial relic. So nice to see. There must be hundreds of identical stations in small towns in Africa and India. I do not condone colonialism. I do not know enough about it. I do not know what it meant for the progress and self-respect of the natives. Surely Gandhi did and Saad Zaghloul and the natives who hated their foreign overlords. One can perhaps draw conclusions from that. I just knew the British officers, my father befriended long ago, and I was in awe of them, at the time. So handsome and friendly and condescending to a tiny chap. I lost much of this awe during my studies in England.
I bought Time and Newsweek for the news of the week and the time on my hands.
I bought a packet of cigarettes for Abdou. I bought foreign Kit Kat wafers for Amina. She would not accept them that first time.
“For your children,” I told her.
“I don‟t have any.”
“Aren‟t you married?”
Coquettishly, “None of your business.”
“Take them, Amina, to fatten up.”
“I am fine as I am.”
“You are wonderful, you are a doll but Egyptian men prefer fat women. Simina ou beda, fat and white.”
“I am not white.”
“That‟s why I like you.” (like and love, the same word in Arabic).
“Behave yourself ya khawaga.”
“Okay but please don‟t humiliate me. Take the chocolates as a sign of friendship.” It had become a regular ritual and she frowned with contrived vexation every time I presented her the Kit Kats. I went to the pharmacy and bought a box of Czech Gold Coin condoms. Then I cycled to the Chinese Gardens. I sat on a stone bench in the sun.
The wonderful gardens were in tatters. The manicured grass lawns sandpapered to the hard dry earth by hordes of football playing schoolchildren, the fine limestone statues broken, disfigured, the large limestone pots, devoid of plants and the flower beds of exotic flowers, extensions of the football pitch. Had I not known it in its prime, perhaps I would not have minded.
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I sat there not thinking. The sun was pleasant and made me sleepy. Dr Fatthi says sleep replenishes our serotonin levels. Also minimal thought activity. So, I stayed a while keeping my mind vacant. If I started thinking I would work myself in a bind. Drugs or no drugs. I slept a while lying on the stone bench until a schoolchildren‟s football team moved in for a little after-school-before-going-home practice. I took the bicycle and pedaled sleepily to the clinic. Abdou was waiting for his bike.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” I told him.
“It‟s still early,” he said.
A lot of grace surviving in old-timers. In the lowly old-timers, I should have said.
I gave him the cigarettes.
“Rabbena y khallik, God keep you,” he muttered.
Lunch was being served as I entered the clinic. I saw Marian sitting in the lounge waiting for me. She smiled, I smiled.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good afternoon,” she answered.
Her eyes were puffed from sleep. She was given drugs. Sleep was, at the moment, the main part of her therapy. She had combed her hair and put a little makeup on. She had lost some weight and was looking better. Prettier. She was terrible when she came in. Not fat but much plumper than I had ever seen her before. And smashed up.
“How are you?”
“Okay,” she said.
“I‟ll just run and leave these things in my room,” I told her.
I was back in a jiffy.
“Shall we go in?” I asked her.
We moved to the dining room and sat at our usual table. Most of the tables were occupied and bits of subdued conversation could be heard here and there but mostly disjointed. It would be the rattle of the cutlery on the plates and the human silence an outsider would notice. The servant brought our servings from the kitchen. I looked at them. I asked him for an empty plate. I removed some of her food and some of mine on the empty plate and asked him to take it away.
“You are merciless,” she said with a smile.
“Eat slowly,” I told her, “drink some water and it will be all right. I am keeping you company in your hunger.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “We share the same hunger.”
She was supposed to rest after lunch but in the afternoon she knocked at my door and I put aside my reading material and we went down for a little exercise. Dr Fatthi did not want her to tire herself. So we walked in the streets outside the clinic for a little over half an hour in a gentle gait. He usually saw her late afternoon at around seven and we were back on time. I questioned her about these sessions with our friendly doctor but there was no specific direction I could surmise from what she told me. Just talk and talk about recent events in her life. Perhaps he was trying to find a lead, as he did with me, unsuccessfully. I had been reading psychology books for years and had subscribed to a psychiatry periodical which I read avidly but was not always in a position to understand its contents because of the scientific terms and the pharmacology of drugs. Dr Fatthi never failed to express his displeasure.
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“Why are you complicating your life?” he used to tell me. “A little knowledge is more dangerous than total ignorance. And the smatterer is, I am sorry to say, foolish.”
“You remind me of our priests,” I told him. “Their motto is, have faith and don‟t inquire.”
He laughed.
“The only thing I want to tell you is, don‟t ever pretend to be a psychiatrist. It is very dangerous.”
“To whom would I pretend?” I asked.
“To yourself primarily and perhaps to a friend or acquaintance.” But, by now, it was ingrained, the need to follow closely the progress of psychoanalysis of persons I knew. For the present, Marian‟s.
“Are you telling him everything?” I asked.
“No. Some things I would not tell him on pain of death.”
“I sympathize totally.”
By quarter to eight her half-hour session was over and we sat in the lounge. We did not talk much. On purpose. We did not want to be linked. When she came to the clinic, I had not seen her. Dr Fatthi told me, the next day, that Marian a friend of Angela, my wife, was brought to the clinic the night before.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” I answered. “She was a colleague of my wife when Angela was in Cairo. What‟s wrong?”
“Well, I cannot go into details but I have been treating Marian on and off for some time. In fact your wife introduced us. She sent her to me. Two days ago Marian tried to commit suicide. She jumped out of the window of her bedroom but, miraculously, a ledge broke her fall and she tumbled onto the balcony just below. She is bruised all over but, can you imagine, not a bone was broken. She was in the Greek hospital all day yesterday and she asked to be moved here. When you see her be nice to her but not too nice, if you know what I mean. I want her completely calm. No anxieties, no stress, no emotions.”
I was shaken but kept my mouth shut. I did not see her for the next week because she was under sedation. I did not mention her to Dr Fatthi again. We kept our friendship to ourselves. It was he that told me when to pay her a visit.
Dinner was at eight thirty. Again, the diminution of portions.
“Take it easy,” Marion said, “I‟m hungry.”
“So am I,” I told her. “You are doing fine, you are losing weight. You are reverting to the pretty woman I knew. I know Dr Fatthi would say I am causing you stress and anxiety but I don‟t care. Finding your old physical comeliness will boost your self-respect. I think that‟s important, too.”
From about nine till ten we sat in the lounge watching a film on television with Ismail Yassine. A slapstick comedy. Quite a number of our fellow patients were with us.
Glazed eyes and silence, hardly a laugh. At ten, even before the film ended, we were ushered out. Ten-thirty was lights out. Almost a prison. A few subdued goodnights and off I went to the first floor, the men‟s section and Marian to the second. I undressed put on my pajamas and started to read in bed but after a short while felt sleepy. I put my tiny alarm clock under my pillow, closed the light and started replenishing my serotonin levels.
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It went off at twelve-thirty, quietly, in my ear, under the pillow. I jumped up, took a quick, frantic shower in my tiny bathroom, dried myself, combed my hair, a touch of cologne, put on my robe de chambre on my nude body, took my keys, a few condoms, shut the light and, silently, barefoot, slithered along the darkened walls to the staircase.
Up one floor, veering to the left, counting, one, two, three, four, five, six doors. An almost inaudible tap and the door opened with a squeak. Damn, we must have it oiled. I keep forgetting. It was dark. I went in. The door squeaked shut.
I took a blind step in the darkness to the warmth of a naked body, almost my size, opulent and soft; to strong, enveloping arms and the rapid tearing off of my gown. To an avid mouth searching mine and a wild tongue. To dexterous, caressing hands and seconds, minutes of breathless fighting kisses and bites. Disoriented difficult movements, intoxicated with passion and the need for constant contact and a stumble to the white, hospital bed. We lay carefully. Another squeaker, this bed of depressions and unhappiness, hardly ever of love. Kisses, caresses, noisy breaths, soft, stifled moans, touching, searching, exposing, prodding, squeezing gently and roughly, tongues like brushes painting body parts, arousing nerve endings, expressing requirements, requests. I entered; started moving in this world beyond our world, fluid, warm, sensual and spiritual, primordial and occult, a world godly and devilish, an instrument of survival. A flash, the Gold Coins! I stopped. Got off the bed with minimal squeaking and searched for my dressing gown in the darkness on the floor, and when I found it, fumbled for the pockets. Marian laughed. She whispered,
“Dr Fatthi would be very upset if he knew how much stress and anxiety your delay is causing me.”
I tiptoed back, in armor, to her open body, to delve inside her, to move, to love her, to ignore the squeaking of the bed and reach our liberating, silent-as-possible groaning orgasm. To rest in a sweat, an embrace, my hand on a plump, full breast; hers holding the bridge of love we shared.
“Do you think hunger is aphrodisiac?” she asked in whisper.
“That‟s what they say.”
“It must be. Is that why you are starving me?”
“Yes.”
“Liar. You want me to lose weight.”
“Yes. I want you to be the beautiful girl you were.”
“I was never beautiful.”
“You were; you are beautiful in a strange, special way. And sexy and lively and attractive.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Never stopped. Ever since those kisses at Agami.”
“It‟s strange how our lives were linked throughout. Crossing again and again and now we are in a loony bin together.”
“Isn‟t it wonderful? Aren‟t we a little lucky after all?” I laughed. What irony! Yes, I thought, wonderful and lucky, with our unexpected, furtive happiness in a nuthouse.
“To be together? Oh, yes Marian. I wish you would always look at the bright side and have the courage not throw yourself off balconies.” 173
“Don‟t talk as if you don‟t know how it is.”
“I do, my darling. That was a silly thing to say.”
“We shall get better. I already feel less stressed, less depressed. You are my wonder drug.”
“Dr Fatthi said I am well enough to leave. He said I should give it a try.” She slipped out of my embrace and turned on her back. She was motionless. Eyes open, looking up in the darkness, the abyss of her life. I caressed her thick, black hair.
“What did you answer?” she said, almost loudly.
“What do you think?”
“Don‟t torture me.”
“I told him, no. I wasn‟t ready. Marian, we shall leave this place together.” She leapt at me like a tigress, mauled me and devoured me. She was a person, she said it herself, who needed sex, who expressed herself with sex. Most women can take it or leave it, some are indifferent to it but to some it is manna. To Marian it was considerably more. We rested again after our second lovemaking and almost went to sleep in our warm fleshy comfort. But I was careful not to let myself go. We could not afford to be found out. So we talked a while in whispers and I asked her if Dr Fatthi told her what her particular depression is called.
“I think he called it hypomania,” she said. I am not sure.
I left at three-thirty. Collected and wrapped the used condoms, gave Marian a lingering kiss and her sleeping pill she should have taken hours earlier, despite her protestations that she did not need it, that she would now sleep like a log, put on my robe de chambre and left through the squeaking door of bliss, along the dark corridor, down the staircase and into my room.
“Get up, get up, get up,” chirped Amina. “How can you sleep so much?”
“I was dreaming of you.”
“Is that why you look so tired?”
“Oh yes. It was wonderful. We played lovely games. Shall I tell you?”
“I don‟t want to hear. Now, get up. I have not got all day.” She comes to my bed and throws back the covers.
“A kiss, Amina, please.”
She bends and I tumble her on the bed. I try to kiss her lips. She turns her face and my kiss lands on her cheek. She carries out her ritual little slaps and gets up. With the effort her uniform gathers high over her knees. Two shapely, milk-chocolate legs make me ogle. She is annoyed.
“Behave yourself, Paul. Somebody might come in.”
“Hey! You have my name right, finally. And no khawaga to it.”
“You are behaving like a schoolboy.”
“That‟s why I‟m here. I‟m a little cuckoo.”
She laughs. I jump up and give her the Kit Kats. She takes them.
“I don‟t eat them,” she says, “I give them away.”
“I give them with my love. You give my love away?”
“Yes.”
“Shame on you.”
She laughs throatily, deliciously.
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I stare at her. She looks back. We look intently at each