“Twenty years! You really are thinking a long way into the future.”
“Yes, because thinking short-term will only multiply the problems. Leaving the country to go abroad and all that. What kind of life will we forge? How long will it last?
Did you think, Alex, of your family? Their pain? Did you think of the ridicule that shall be heaped on you from everyone but especially from your Greeks? Did you think of their ostracism and derision?”
“No. I never gave a damn.”
“You imagine you are tough but you are a softie, my Alex. A good boy, as Talaat called you once. Talaat also told you to act in my best interests. I think we are reversing roles. I am acting for yours because I do love you. I have thought deeply about it. I have torn my brain apart. There is no way out.”
“There must be.”
“Think about it, you little dreamer. We shall be in touch for some time yet.”
'Yet' was not destined to be very long. Events were moving fast. Spurred by the curious logic of propriety, tradition and religion. By the overriding notion that no young woman should stay unmarried. That, especially, independent-minded persons like Leila should be tied to restraining bonds to keep them out of harm's way. Harm? Yes. To the busybody families, intelligence, freedom, love, happiness, a zest for life was harm. It could not be tolerated. The pull towards mediocrity was a set frame of mind. It was almost institutional.
In a strange way, this last confrontation of reality that Leila put me through, this dumping in the chill waters of truth, shattered my instinctive basic emotions. Perhaps, it finally dawned on me how impenetrable our circumstances were, compounded with her cold logic that could see no way out. I still loved her deeply. I still missed her appallingly. She always came to mind with an ache in the heart, with anguish, with a 42
churning stomach. But I seemed to have suppressed my physical need for her. Not for her presence but her sex, her passion, her desire. I did not dream of her body, of her moans, her humming and deliriums. I did not miss her thousand sexual improvisations of Paradise where there was no shame. I had become frigid. For the next couple of weeks we talked steadily in our post-midnight phone calls. I heard her news with a curious dispassionate interest. She was already out of my reach. I had not seen her for weeks.
How many? I had lost count. Since our last obsessive meeting in my flat.
A man had been found. A very good party. Everybody was happy except Leila and me. A man a few years older than her. A widower like Leila, without children.
Everything fitted perfectly. He was educated and wealthy. He had lived and worked in the States, married and made his fortune there. His young American wife died of cancer and he decided to return to his country. He met Leila and was immediately infatuated by her. She had the right balance of the European and the Oriental he was looking for. She had the brains. He could tell, behind the reserve. She certainly had the beauty. A certain melancholy resignation, too, that was so appealing. He asked her to marry him.
“Did you accept,” I asked calmly as if I were not involved. It is true. I seemed to be no longer involved; I felt I no longer counted.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he is by far the best of the crop that was paraded in front of me so far.
Because it is the only way I shall be able to get out of this hellhole I am in. Because he is rich and he will provide me with a life of travel and luxury. Because I shall have security.
Because he is pleasant, refined and a man of the world. Because he is educated. Because he loves me. Because he is patient and understanding and puts up with my moodiness.
Because he wants a child and so do I and there is not much time left for that. Because, perhaps, in time, I might get to love him.”
She started crying.
“Oh, my darling Eve of the snake, I really have lost you.”
“My little Alex, it was Paradise outside the gates while it lasted. But didn't you know that even Paradise is temporary? You, yourself, told me that the word, forever, was treacherous and a lie. It is for children's fairy tales. We have lived through one, but it is over.”
Leila was mine for just Alf Leila ou Leila. Almost to the night.
18 / 3 / 2001
43
CHEZ RAYMOND
Stories, stories, stories. Stories without end. So long as life exists, fiction will have an inexhaustible supply of reality to feed on.
Orpheus Looks Back.
My name is Jimmy. It started off as Jiminy by some unlikely stroke of Raymond‟s humor but deteriorated to Jimmy within a few days. In any case, Tania called me Jimmy right off and Jiminy proved too difficult for the staff. Too long for the average brain capacity of our boys and girls. I cannot imagine where Raymond picked it up. He was barely educated and his English consisted of ten words, a dozen grimaces and a hundred gestures. But he did travel often to England and, I must admit, it was inspired since, I suppose, it was meant, if not to ridicule me, at least to tease me. For I am an ugly chap.
Jiminy brings to mind a blond winsome, beautiful English boy. I am not a Quasimodo but there is not a single attractive feature on my face. When I look at the mirror, I wonder why everything went so wrong. I am on the short side, plump with wide hips, an awkward gait of wildly swinging arms and I have a loud, plaintive voice. I am also a little effeminate. Oh yes, I know it. It is not altogether bad for my job and, in any case, I cannot help it though I am not queer. At least, I do not think so. I am married and I have an ugly little boy who does not look altogether normal. Adel is all right but he looks as if he has a loose screw in his brain. A permanent look of surprise on his face. I love him dearly.
My real name is Makram Younes. I am a Copt. A Christian Egyptian. I was born forty-one years ago in a small village of the Said (Upper Egypt) called Timsaheia, which has a sizeable Christian community. My father was the local barber. Some years after I was born we moved to Cairo even though we earned our living quite comfortably, there.
Well, as well as one can in a small, cheerless Egyptian village. He had all the Christian clientele and a Moslem barber all the Moslems. In those days, religious fanaticism had not yet flared up and we led a tolerable, tension-free existence although we did not mix with the Moslems and not much love was lost between us. In a small way, my father was a man of vision. He wanted to better our life, especially to provide me with an education, and to broaden the horizons that a small, dull, stagnant, agriculture-oriented village provided.
In Cairo, we settled on the fringes of a second-rate district called Shoubra. Many regions of Cairo had their „European‟ centers, which were relatively clean and well kept with tramcars and viable communications and on their edges, near the fields, near the desert and the industrial areas were a hodge-podge of cheap, hopelessly unattractive and threadbare, small apartment blocks built on dirt roads. It was there that we rented a small flat. Years later, with Egypt‟s population explosion and relentless expansion of the city we found ourselves smack in the middle of Shoubra proper. All around us roads were carved and paved, modern, better-quality buildings were erected, new bus routes installed and a suffocating, crowded humanity was forever milling around the new shops, food 44
markets, offices and banks. But even in the early fifties, the move from Timsaheia to Shoubra was mind-boggling. The crowds, the shops, the coffee houses and bars, the gaiety and zest of life that the foreign communities provided, were new and exhilarating.
The main city center was populated almost exclusively by Greeks, Italians Jews and Armenians. Working class people and employees in the main, they were a colorful and lively mix. The Egyptians were delegated to the fringes. They were the second-class citizens of their country and it was evident that they could not have missed the racism, contempt and tolerant, good-humored disdain of the Egyptian-born foreigners. Not then, not now, did an Egyptian-born European consider himself a native of the country of his birth, nor an equal to the Arab Moslem or Copt. He considered himself superior to the local Arab stock. Perhaps that was inevitable given the poverty, the wretched living conditions, the lack of education and ignorance and, finally, the unthinking adherence to the religious rigor and narrow-mindedness of Islam and Christianity of the native population.
The foreign communities, ever since their migration to Egypt in the days of Mohammed Ali, have kept their culture, language, customs and religion intact. They built their own exclusive churches, schools, clubs, stadiums and hospitals. They published newspapers and literary magazines in their own language, produced plays and nurtured their poets and novelists, who in many cases achieved international renown. Always, at the back of the foreigner‟s mind was the thought that his stay in Egypt was temporary. He would stay put while the going was good, but inevitably, one day, he would have to return to his mother country. The exodus started with Abdel Nasser‟s 1952 Revolution. It was a trickle at first but within twenty years Shoubra belonged to its rightful owners, the Arab Moslems and Copts.
My father Younes managed to put aside a little money from his business in the village and this went a long way to shield us from undue hardship. It also helped him realize a lifelong dream. He took up a job in a small downtown women‟s hairdresser‟s shop at reduced wages for he did not have the skills to deal with the female head. He had always longed to be women‟s hairdresser and in Timsaheia this was clearly impossible.
Women had no use for coiffeurs. They never uncovered or exposed their hair. They did not fancy having their throats slit by their menfolk. At the small salon, which was owned and run by a young Armenian coiffeur and his sister, he soon learnt the techniques and knack of washing, cutting, shaping, combing and permanent waving of long, beautiful and not so beautiful female hair. Both brother and sister were unstinting in teaching him the art and secrets of the trade and my father repaid them with hard work and canine devotion. Within a year, he was their right-hand man and was earning normal wages.
Two years later, brother and sister immigrated to Canada and my father negotiated a bank loan and bought the shop from them. For the next few years, the going was rough. Most of the original clients of the shop who had friendly ties with the Armenian couple did not wish to continue patronizing the shop under my father‟s management and took their hair-styling business elsewhere. To tell the truth, my father was a less than inspiring talent. I do not blame him. He came late to this dainty profession. He came out of a village in the Said, where as a men‟s barber, a shear or two out of place was rarely noticed and where instead of advising the client on what hair cream to use, he usually advised him to soak his hair with kerosene to get rid of the lice.
He struggled pluckily for many harrowing years to keep the women‟s salon going and to 45
repay the bank loan and he did succeed but with a new kind of clientele. The emerging, native middle-class, which was replacing the Egyptian-born foreigners that were, at the time, leaving the country in droves.
I still live in Shoubra with my wife and Adel in a nice little apartment not far from my parent‟s home. They are both alive and kicking and I visit them at least twice a week.
I really do feel I owe them a debt of gratitude for what they did for me. I was always an ugly child and was scorned by other children. Sometimes, disagreeably looking parents have good-looking children and, sometimes, as in my case, ordinary-looking persons have unattractive children. Because of my looks, I never had an intimate friend and it was my mother I turned to for comfort and support. She was always there to help me with her simple-minded advice and village homilies. She deliberately occupied me in my pre-school years with the upkeep of our house, taught me to be neat and clean and through the years made an excellent cook of me. She also taught me how to knit and sow and in those pre-television days I spent much of my time knitting the woolies of my family and the odd present we would give away, never revealing that they were my handicrafts for rear of ridicule. I had become quite an expert at it and my mother often told me I could, eventually, become a tailor or even start a small manufacturing business in woolen products.
My father had higher hopes for me. It was his dream that I would eventually enter university. It did not matter in what field of study. Graduating from a university was enough. It did not come to that but I am grateful for his aspirations, his efforts and sacrifices. I am grateful to him for this incongruity that now exists between my profession and my education and knowledge of the English language. I am grateful to him because I am happy with both. He, finally, did achieve his goal. He did widen my horizons even if I did not realize the whole of his dream.
At the age of seven, he enrolled me at the English Mission College. It was a sort of second-class English school. Not as exclusive as the English School Cairo, at Heliopolis, or the Victoria College of Alexandria, where the offspring of the moneyed Egyptian classes mingled with those of Middle Eastern prime ministers and heads of state, the sons and daughters of diplomats and all the English boys and girls that were available in Egypt. It was, however, a large, coeducational school of good reputation. It was also quite expensive but my father did not stint on the fees. He had just finished repaying the bank loan and our finances were turning around. He might have used the money in a thousand other ways but that never crossed his mind. In the end, I suppose I disappointed him but not a word of reproach escaped his lips. He was only doing what he had to do.
From the EMC I have not particularly happy memories. Nor unhappy ones either.
It was a large school with all the trappings of the English public schools such as brown and yellow school uniforms, shorts with long stockings, blazers, caps and ties. With the same accent on sports and games and the same contempt for the „swots‟, the hard-working students. The student body was practically all from the Egyptian middle-class with very few Egyptian-born foreigners. Boys and girls were taught separately and as in all the other English schools, after the Suez crisis of ‟56, Egyptian teachers replaced the English staff and the school deteriorated in every way possible.
Twelve years I spent at EMC, six at the Junior School and six as a senior.
Unfortunately, I have not much to show for it except for my love and proficiency of the 46
English language and its literature. A little history and a little geography as well but that‟s about all. Do not ask me about mathematics and the science subjects. In those, I was a complete zero and as for sports, the situation was even worse. With that strange build of my body, I could neither run fast enough, nor jump and perform passable gymnastic exercises nor play any of the school games. In football, I was terrified when the ball was passed on to me. I tried to keep out of its way. If by a stroke of bad luck it reached my feet and a boy from the opposite side charged to retrieve it, I usually passed it on to him and ran away. I was the laughing stock of my class and my every timid and anxious effort, in whatever sport I tried, brought forth gales of derisive laughter from my classmates.
I was often maltreated and bullied; pushed around and beaten by the toughies at school. The verbal abuse and teasing were often worse than the occasional shoulder punch, leg paralyser or humiliating slap at the back of my neck. There were two or three nice boys that usually tried to defend me and rescue me from these nasty situations and kept a lookout for any trouble I might get into and though they were more than civil with me, they never warmed up to my attempts at friendship. More than once, I heard the word
„queer‟ and „homo‟ being whispered about me. Perhaps, this put them off. I was very much on my own during those years at EMC. If I did earn a scrap of respect from my classmates, it was because of my mastery of the English language. I wrote fine, well thought out, sensitive essays which my teacher, often, had me read to the class. There was always a lot of noise and teasing while I read but I knew that at least in that I had no equal.
When I finished school, I just managed to scrape through the local GCE exams.
My average grade did not enable me to enter university. I would have loved to study English literature in which I am sure I would have excelled but such is the inflexibility of the system that my nearly perfect marks in the English-related subjects were offset by poor marks elsewhere and I was left out in the cold with a pair of sorely disappointed parents.
Of the few options that were left open for me, I chose what might seem the most obvious. To go to work at my father‟s hairdressing salon. It was clearly the easiest choice but that was not the reason for my decision. My passion for reading and literature does point to an artistic bent. I loved painting and had I been able to afford to buy paints and oils and canvasses, I would have undoubtedly have started painting, if only as a hobby. I spent many a Sunday diligently rummaging in second-hand bookshops for books on art and pictures of the great masters. I loved beauty. It was something that touched my heart.
A beautiful woman and even a good-looking man would nestle in my brain and I would think about them for days and days. I loved women in a dispassionate sort of way. I felt comfortable in their presence. Is it not reasonable after the awful treatment I suffered at school that I should feel this way?
Later, when I started working with them and mingling with them unselfconsciously and trying to the best of my ability to make them beautiful, I found that my affinity was reciprocated. Was it my ugliness and my slightly effeminate manner that put them at ease? Was it my desire to satisfy their slightest whim? My obvious sincerity?
Another decisive factor for entering this profession was that I enjoyed working with my hands. I liked this temporary change of a face I achieved, the change of looks, the self-47
confidence and satisfaction I imparted to a well-combed woman by the right hair styling and its skillful execution. I felt I had a talent that would bloom.
Unfortunately, my father‟s salon was not quite up to my expectations. Did I not know it? Had I not been there many a time? Of course I had and I should have expected it. Nevertheless, getting down to brass tacks is different. The salon was just a big shop on a main street in town just off the shopping district but could not accommodate more than three clients at a time. It looked slightly run down. What with all the expenses of my education, not much money was left for its innovation. Well, that could be fixed. What disappointed me more than anything else was the clientele. They were the middle and lower-middle class women of the neighborhood. A class that was emerging from oblivion in the wake of the departing Egyptian-born foreign communities. Women whose husbands were taking over the shops, the employment posts in large department stores, in banks and businesses that were being evacuated by the foreign exodus. Oh, they were nice enough but did not satisfy my penchant for beauty and glamour. Glamour is the privilege and flaunting of wealth. Beauty is rarely found in the absence of a comfortable lifestyle. It, too, gravitates towards money, is sucked in and adopted by wealth. I did not care to work with the likeable but ordinary, scruffy women of our class. Housewives with dull, uninteresting, stagnant lives, their faces lined with the worries of running a household where there was never enough money to spare, with unkempt clothing and frizzy, graying hair. However, it was with them that I started my career.
Once I decided to become a hairdresser, I had no other option but to join my father at his shop. It was a start and there I learnt the basic skills of this vocation. He already had three employees. A young man and woman who were skilled coiffeurs and a boy of fifteen or so who kept the shop tidy and clean and did the small chores that would arise. Hag Younes, as my father was usually called, Hag being the title of persons who had been on pilgrimage to the holy lands, picked up comb and scissors only when there was a rush or an old, favorite client to serve. Ordinarily, his day was calm and he had ample time on his hands to chat with neighboring shopkeepers, enjoy his Turkish coffees and when I joined the business, to devote time to teaching me the techniques of hairdressing. He was still young, in his middle forties, but he did look forward to the day when I would take over and he made an earnest and touching effort to pass on to me as well and as thoroughly as he could all he knew about his craft.
I stayed in the shop for about a year and a half before I gave notice to my father that I would look for employment elsewhere. He was devastated. He could not understand why I would leave a job where I earned good wages and a business that would eventually be mine. I found it very difficult to explain that I was suffocating in his shop with its dowdy clientele, its less than mediocre performance and its cramped space. I had learnt all there was to learn in that shop. All that my father could teach me and all I could pick up from my other two colleagues. By now, I knew I had talent. I knew I was a better craftsman than my father and all his employees put together. I was ambitious. Not for money, not to open my own shop but to excel in this fascinating art of making a woman beautiful by fashioning the hair on her head. I could not explain all this without hurting my father‟s feelings and I just kept on saying repeatedly that I needed a change and that, perhaps later, I would return. Luckily, my father had kept on his two coiffeurs and when I left there was no gap to fill. Hag Younes would just have to work a little harder. The salon, inevitably, slipped back to its former mediocrity but I do not think anyone noticed.
48
It was spring when I left the shop and an inconsolable Hag Younes. The time of the year when the heat was starting to be disagreeable and the dust from the khamsin very unpleasant. I went to my tailor, had light gray summer suit made and, in it, feeling dusty, sweaty and uncomfortable made the rounds of hairdressing salons in all of Cairo‟s luxury hotels. There were not too many in those days. Abdel Nasser, the Arab Maximum Leader had died leaving our country a political and economic shambles. Sadat‟s „ Infatah’, the gradual abandoning of socialism and opening to the West was still a few years away.
Budgets were tight and tourism had not come into its own with all the international hotel chains rushing in to build new towers and refurbish old and famous but moribund hotels such as the Mena House facing the great pyramid, the Semiramis and Omar Khayam on the banks of the Nile.
In any case, it seemed that for me, the luxury hotels were out. One disdainful look by snobbish head-coiffeurs and the answer was usually a curt, „No‟. It was obvious they did not like my looks. They were not even interested to try me out. I was very much disheartened and I inevitably embarked on a downward spiral of preferences. I made the rounds of the so-called first-class hotels, which in those days were anything but that and had very little work in their in-house salons. Then I tried the bigger and better-class shops in town, again with very little success. I shuddered at the idea that I might have to return to Hag Younes. However, fate works in strange ways and a man from Timsaheia on two occasions marked my life.
He was my father‟s customer years ago at the village and they met by chance in Cairo, a few years back, as Rizk effendi‟s office was very close to my father‟s shop. He was an accountant and he fell into the habit of having a cup of Turkish coffee and a chat at my father‟s shop every so often if he could spare a moment. Of course, he was a Copt otherwise such intimacies would not have developed. We exchanged house visits often and I became friendly with his elder son, Osama, who was about my age. He had two younger children as well, a son and a daughter. One of Osama‟s girl cousins, Jehan, worked at a high-class hairdressing salon at the swanky district of Zamalek. Zamalek is a sort of island surrounded by the Nile, where most of the pre-revolution Egyptian aristocracy lived in lavish villas, surrounded by exclusive sporting clubs, expensive private schools, foreign embassies and luxury apartment buildings. Osama asked me if I would like him to ask his cousin to introduce me to the owner, a certain Raymond who was of Greek origin. Of course I would. I would be more than grateful if she would do this for me. In this manner, a date was fixed after Jehan asked for permission to bring a relative for a tryout.
The appointment was at eleven. I left Shoubra at nine thirty, took a bus to the city center and a mini-bus to Zamalek. I then walked around asking directions for the right street and by the time I reached the salon I was more or less on time. From a little way off, I saw the signboard with the flowery script, Chez Raymond. The shop seemed to occupy the whole ground floor of a luxury apartment block. It had its own separate entrance with a marble staircase of perhaps seven or eight steps, widening out a little as it descended with shining bronze banisters. The staircase ascended to a small patio and on to a large double door of spotless, thick glass with two, long vertical bronze handles where you could see your own distorted face. A gay colorful sunshade covered the staircase and on the pavement, all along the length of the building, were multicolored 49
ceramic pots in carefully arranged color schemes, with a large variety of flowers and plants.
I entered timidly inside and I thought, oh yes, wonderful, the place is air-conditioned. Right opposite the entrance was an elaborate period desk with papers, two telephones and a small wooden sign with the legend CAISSE. A pretty young woman was sitting at the desk and on the other side a blond woman of about forty. To the left was a large sitting room with comfortable armchairs arranged in three small individual areas, each around a small table with ashtrays and magazines. Facing the sitting room, the main working area of the shop opened up directly with no partition between the two rooms. It was spacious with eight working locations, each with mirror and chair, dressers, drawers and dryers and all the tools of the trade. Beyond, a few doors led to other parts of the shop. The shop was quiet and I saw just two ladies being attended to by two male coiffeurs and some women‟s voices could be heard chatting somewhere beyond.
I addressed the young woman behind the desk and told her I had come for an appointment arranged by Jehan. The older blonde woman looked at me inquiringly.
“You must be Makram,” she said. “You are very punctual. I cannot say the same about Raymond. You shall probably have to wait a while. Perhaps a long while. It is with him you have to speak. I hope you are not in a hurry.”
“I have all day,” I said. I looked around and added, “This is a lovely hairdressing salon.”
“Yes,” she agreed and then she called in a loud voice, “Jehan.” A young girl appeared from inside and looked at us.
“Here he is,” the woman told her. “Your boyfriend has come.” The girl looked at me and blushed deeply. A fleeting look of dismay crossed her eyes. She was dark-complexioned like most of the people from the south and pretty with sparkling eyes. The blush made her face even darker. We had never seen each other before and clearly, she did not relish the implied relationship between us. But she smiled at me and came to shake my hand, hesitantly verifying my identity.
“Makram?”
“Yes. Thank you for arranging this appointment,” I said shaking her hand. Then turning to the blond woman, I explained, “Jehan is the cousin of a friend of mine. This is the first time I meet her.”
The woman laughed.
“Okay,” she said, “Okay, no harm done. You can go Jehan. Makram bring a chair and sit down and tell me about yourself. But perhaps I should introduce myself first. My name is Tania and I am Raymond‟s wife. I am also a professional hairdresser and I certainly know what is going on in here. I know who is working well and who is fooling around. I know who is doing good work and who is not worth keeping in the shop. The grand master, the artist, is Raymond but I am what you might call the chief executive.
Okay? What about you?”
She spoke to me in perfect colloquial Arabic. She was a pleasant looking woman of average height and a slim bu