Beer in the Snooker Club (18 page)

Well, the Pasha had been called from Upper Egypt. Oh,
not because I had pushed Mounir in the pool, but because the said Mounir wants to buy a villa in Heliopolis and they wonder if an extra thirty thousand pounds or so could be squeezed out of the fellah without actually selling any land.

I looked at my uncle and winked. He shook his head violently. And then the whole business started again.

‘It
was
an accident,’ I said.

‘Certainly not. You did it on purpose.’

My mother took her handkerchief out of her bag, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly she looked round, opened her crumpled handkerchief quite flat, as though showing us there was nothing in it, and blew her nose.

I laughed out loud. My mother has a reputation for crocodile tears. She used to put a piece of onion in her handkerchief, until the sudden reek made me suspicious one day.

‘What are you laughing at?’ my aunt shouted.

‘Honestly, honestly,’ I said; ‘I just tried to get out of my chair and accidentally knocked against him.’

‘Liar! Why did you run away then?’

‘I’ve explained a thousand times.’ My explanation was that Mounir was so popular at the club and myself so unpopular, I was afraid the servants would have thrown me out themselves. This pleases her. But she was still threatening to take my mother to live with her and to give our flat up.

‘Give him another chance,’ said my uncle the Pasha.

‘Pasha, he is not normal.’

Sometimes my humour-nerve or sympathetic-nerve or whatever you want to call it, is unexplainably stretched and
even the softest breeze, as it were, can make it tingle. Again I laughed. It’s this word ‘Pasha’ you see. My uncle’s name is Amis, and they called him Amis until titles were abolished. Suddenly, for thirty-five thousand pounds’ worth, they call him Pasha. I couldn’t control myself.

‘Regarde-le …’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just tired. I have a little bit of fever.’

My mother sprang out of her chair with her hand stretched straight to my forehead.

‘Il est brûlant
,
’
she screamed.
‘C’est peut être la typhoïde.’

‘
La typhoïde
, to us, has a value all its own. It is used, like the gambler’s fare home, only when everything else is lost. It will surprise the medical profession to know that in our families various people have had typhoid many times. We love that disease, but although we love it, we don’t like to die of it (as many of us have). Hence the blessing of chloromycin. We can now have typhoid without actually dying. The disease is endowed with ceremonies, blessings and rituals accompanying the survivor long after his recovery. As I said, many of us
have
died of it, and so it hasn’t lost its power for attracting solicitude, affection and money, chloromycin or not.

‘Really,’ my aunt said, ‘he’s already had it twice.’

‘Je t’en prie
,
’
my mother said. ‘Ziza had it twice and died of it the third time.’

I didn’t particularly want
la typhoïde
then. The last time I had it, Font was living with us and I persuaded him to have it too because we were both unprepared for our exams. Our professor relative, the university lecturer, decided we were too weak to study, and so hinted at our coming questions – hinted,
that is, by giving us the actual papers two weeks before we were due to see them. As my mother had said then, through an aromatic tear, ‘they probably won’t live to see the results.’

No, I didn’t want
la typhoïde
. I was thinking of this, when I heard the word
armée
.

The army, our army. The one which travels in taxis. It is surprising how, during my sojourn in London, my family had become reconciled to the army. Not only reconciled to it, but actually getting in to it. Soon, one could see, we were going to
be
the army. Cousins, relatives, brothers were being snatched from the universities and placed in the army. Although ‘don’t you know who I am – I am a Pasha or the son of one’, has not quite been dropped, it is quite fashionable now to say: ‘Don’t you know who I am – I am a colonel or a general or the son of one.’ They want me to get into the army.

‘The best people,’ my aunt was saying, ‘are in it. Don’t think,’ she continued, ‘it is the shabby affair it was. Are you better than Safwat, the son of Boulos Pasha?’

‘I am not,’ I said.

‘… or than Ammoon and his brother Yassa?’

‘I am particularly worse than they,’ I said.

‘… or than the son of Foufou?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Or …’

‘It is decided,’ my mother said. ‘You are to go into the army and get married.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘After all, I have sacr …’

‘… ificed your life for me.’

‘A good girl from a good family,’ my uncle, the Pasha, said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with a little bit of land.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And something in the bank.’

‘Would do no harm …’

‘Preferably of military background,’ I said. This annoys him somewhat. The fellah is not as terror-stricken at the word Pasha as he is now at the word Officer.

‘Tu as fini?’
my aunt said.

‘Yes.’

‘Because if you haven’t quite finished,’ she said, ‘I shall close your mouth for good.’

I shut up.

‘Om Kalsoom is singing on the radio,’ I told my uncle.

‘Voilà!’
shouted my aunt. ‘That’s all he’s good for. Anything to annoy us.’

From Turkey to North Africa, Om Kalsoom is the most beloved and revered person alive. She cuts across all sections of the people. A woman in her forties now, she has led an irreproachable life and she possesses a voice of heartrending simplicity and beauty.

‘What … what is she singing?’ my uncle asked, starting to fidget.

‘Voilà
,
’
my aunt repeated.

‘Sing to me slowly, slowly,’
I told him. Her songs last for hours. But those of the French
pensionnat
, the club and the ‘travelled’ consider it a sign of commonness to appreciate Om Kalsoom. Because they are nevertheless oriental musically, they listen instead to Madam Amalia Rodriguez of Portugal, who very feebly resembles Om Kalsoom in voice.

‘Her best song,’ my uncle sighed.

‘This is intolerable,’ my aunt said. ‘This is the limit.’

‘What have I done?’ I said.

‘Do you want us to sit for hours listening to those wails?’ she screamed.

‘I didn’t know you didn’t like her,’ I said.

‘Switch the radio on very softly,’ she said, controlling herself, ‘and don’t utter another word.’

I switched the radio on and returned to my seat, folding my arms. I pretended not to notice my uncle who had pulled his chair up to the radio, stuck his ear to the loud-speaker, and was looking miserable.

‘Put it on louder,’ she screamed,
‘nom de Dieu!’

I turned the knob until the music was audible and returned to my seat.

Corrollos, the servant, stood at the doorway listening. He wears an even more pathetic expression when my aunt visits us.

‘Get a chair from the kitchen and sit down,’ my aunt told him. He looked at her with indescribable devotion, managed to make his eyes water, and returned to the kitchen.

‘Pauvre type
,
’
my aunt said.

‘I don’t know that I can afford to keep him any longer,’ my mother said.

My aunt grunted.

‘I haven’t had a new dress for years. That’s how I live now,’ my mother continued. Two days before she had bought two new dresses.

‘First the car, and now the servants. God knows how it will end.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s terrible.’

‘It’s all because of you,’ she said, taking her handkerchief out again.

‘Now, now, now,’ my uncle said. ‘You’re a good boy, Ram. Don’t make your mother unhappy.’

‘I am sorry,’ I told my uncle. ‘Would you like a cigarette, Uncle Amis?’

‘Yes,’ he said, staring at me. ‘I’ll try one of yours.’

I took my pack out and went to him. I pointed to a particular cigarette and whispered he should smoke it in the bathroom. He nodded eagerly and left. Two minutes later he returned with a disappointed look on his face. I laughed out loud.

‘But he’s completely mad,’ my aunt said.

‘I am sorry,’ I said again. ‘I shan’t utter another word.’ My uncle had thought the cigarette was stuffed with hashish.

Corrollos returned again, standing within sight of my aunt, and thinking I didn’t notice him.

‘Miserable beggar,’ my aunt said. ‘Get a chair and sit down, Corrollos. Sit down until the song is ended.’ He shook his head and returned to the kitchen.

I followed him.

‘Leave him alone,’ my mother said.

I closed the kitchen door and sat on the gas-oven looking at Corrollos.

‘Where is the radio I gave you?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘By God, I’ll murder you,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know how to use it,’ he whined.

‘You’ve been using it for a year.’

‘I’m afraid to break it.’

‘Put it on the table,’ I said, ‘and switch it on.’

He got it out of the kitchen cupboard, put it on the table, and switched it on without plugging it in, shaking his head all the while and handling it as though it were a crystal chandelier.

‘It’s silent,’ I told him.

He bent his head to the loud-speaker and listened intently.

‘Well?’

He shook his head again.

‘You’ve broken it,’ I told him. ‘I am going to deduct two pounds from your salary.’ I pretended I was leaving the kitchen.

‘Perhaps I forgot to plug it,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

He plugged it.

‘What’s this theatre you play every time my aunt comes here?’ I asked.

‘What theatre?’

‘Don’t you know? Did she ever give you a tip in her life, you bloody swine?’

Tip? What tip? He starts whining and tears actually flow down his cheeks and because he has no handkerchief he makes a mess of the tip of his robe.

I left him and returned to the sitting-room.

‘I do all I can,’ my uncle was saying, ‘but they don’t pay.’

‘How long do we have to put up with all this?’ my aunt asked.

‘They don’t pay,’ repeated my uncle. ‘They haven’t got the money.’

‘Haven’t got the money,’ snorted my aunt. ‘I’d rather let the land lie idle than have them rob us in this way.’

Egyptian landowners usually let the land to tenants and do not bother to cultivate it themselves.

‘That would be worse still,’ my uncle said. ‘The land would go bad and we’d get a bad name in the district.’

‘Bad name,’ mimicked my aunt.

‘The times are hard,’ said my uncle.

‘You’re too good to them,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with you. You’ve spoiled them.’

‘The times have changed,’ he said.

‘You’ll have to do something. Mounir will be getting married soon.’

‘We shall have to sell,’ he said.

‘Sell-sell-sell,’ she shouted. ‘If they have the money to buy, they can pay the rent.’

‘It’s not they that buy, my sister,’ he said. ‘Sell one of the apartment houses in Cairo.’

‘Do you think I am mad? That’s what we’ve come to. We starve while the fellaheen owe us money.’

He is kind and gentle, my Uncle Amis, and like any other animal bloats himself on what is within his reach without thinking of anything in particular. Even the fallaheen love him because he sits with them and cracks jokes. He even weeps at their misery at times, just like them, without searching for the cause of that misery. ‘The world,’ he sighs, and they sigh with him and repeat: ‘The world.’

‘Who’s starving?’ I asked.

‘What?’ she shouted. ‘Vivi,’ she said, turning to my mother, ‘I can’t bear to see your son any more. I’ll have a nervous breakdown.’

‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ my mother cried.

‘But I know,’ said my aunt. ‘You are going to live with me and give this flat up. We shall see what he will do then.’

My mother started crying now, in earnest.

‘Apologize to your aunt, Ram, apologize,’ my uncle said.

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘Go and kiss her hand,’ he said.

‘Surtout pas!’
she screamed.

I made as though to go towards her, when the door bell rang. It was Marie. She made straight for my uncle.

‘Pasha,’ she screamed in Arabic, ‘how wonderful to see you again. I have always been asking about you. You look very well indeed.’ Then she turned round to my aunt and said: ‘
Il a l’air malade, le pauvre.’

My uncle is always very embarrassed when society showers it charm upon him for a few seconds. He mumbled polite formulas in Arabic, smiled awkwardly and didn’t know what to do with his hands.

‘Vivi,’ Marie turned to my mother, and then saw she was crying. ‘Poor Vivi,’ she said, changing her tone. ‘You’ve always had trouble, Vivi
cherie
.’ She patted her on the back, kissed my aunt on both cheeks, took her gloves off, and sat down.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

‘Didn’t I say
bonjour
to you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What an afternoon,’ she said. ‘I can’t think clearly any more.’

‘Tell us what happened,’ I said, in a conversational tone.

Marie has always been afraid of me. I don’t know why.
She is one of those devout Catholics who used to go about calling everyone
cousine
and
petite sœur
, and had reached her forties without getting married. She continued to call everyone
tante
and
oncle
, jumping up to kiss them, wearing masculine-type shoes with flat soles, until my aunt suddenly took her under her wing.
‘Elle est tellement serviable
,
cette Marie
,
’
and told her at once not to call her
tante
and to put a stop to all the kid-play.

Marie now looked at my aunt, who made a ‘don’t bother about him’ sign with her head.

‘I hope you are keeping well, Madame Marie,’ my uncle said, ‘madame’ being his epitome of sophistication.

‘Comme il est gentil
,
’
she said. ‘Thank you very much, Pasha. Here we are living from day to day, not knowing what will happen next.’