Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

A little later, when my mother came into my room, she found me covered up in bed. I muttered that I was worn out and feeling ill. She put her hand on my forehead and sounded worried. “We will have to get the doctor to see you.”

“No…I just need to rest. I won’t go to school tomorrow.”

She gave me a baffled look. “If that’s how you feel.”

Thus I pretended to be ill to give my father the chance to raise the school fees. That was the only way to avoid embarrassing him. I did not dare ask him for the money or even discuss the matter directly. I could not bear to see him in a bind even for a moment.

My mother brought me a glass of hot lemon juice and left. After a while, I heard my brother Kamel, who came in and sat next to me. “Hello, Saleha!”

I repeated my symptoms to him, but he can always see right through me. He completely ignored what I was saying and smiled. “Don’t worry. Within two or three days at the most, we will have the fees paid.”

I was about to try to convince him that I really was ill, but he gave me a little bow, planted a kiss on my forehead and left the room.

“Alku.” The name itself is a pharyngeal groan sounded through tightly pursed lips. In Nubian it means a leader or important person, but at the Club it took on mythical dimensions. It called to mind some great and legendary winged beast, the subject of fantastic tales passed down over the generations, until one day the monster suddenly takes flesh and casts its toxic shadow over everything. Alku was just such a creation. His full name was Qasem Muhammad Qasem, and he was a Sudanese Nubian in his sixties. When not speaking Nubian, he spoke heavily accented Arabic, mixing up the masculine and feminine suffixes. He could converse fluently in French and Italian but could barely write them. Alku had two jobs: those of servant and master. He’d first been taken on as the king’s valet, and as part of his duties as master of the wardrobe, he dressed and undressed the king. Alku was the palace’s head chamberlain and the most senior servant, and he enjoyed the confidence of His Majesty.

His relationship with His Majesty greatly overstepped the boundaries of his position. Alku was present at His Majesty’s birth, and he held him in his own hands when the king was just a suckling, and observed with sincere joy his first crawl, his first tottering steps and his first words. When His Majesty was a child, Alku accompanied him on hunting and bicycle trips and horseback-riding lessons. He was the only one who knew whether His Majesty was feigning illness in order to skip torturous lessons with his strict teachers. It was Alku who purloined desserts from the palace kitchen and smuggled them into His Majesty’s suite when his English governess had imposed a harsh dietary regimen upon the boy to make him lose weight. It was also Alku who, with complete discretion, organized His Majesty’s first trysts with beautiful women of the upper class, this to relieve all the adolescent fervor that was affecting his concentration and state of mind. When His Majesty went off to school in England, he insisted upon taking Alku with him, though it was less than two years later that, following his father’s sudden death, the king returned to accede to the throne of Egypt. At that point, Alku gained unprecedented and overwhelming influence at the palace. All royal correspondence, however confidential or important, was opened personally by Alku, who would read it aloud to His Majesty every morning as the latter lay naked in his hot bubble bath, with Iliana, the Greek pedicurist, taking care of his feet, shaving him and trimming his mustache and eyebrows. His Majesty would listen and offer a word or two of comment at most. “We agree” or “later” and so forth. Sometimes, if His Majesty was worried or anxious, he would flip over in the bathtub, and his enormous body would create a huge wave, like that of a great fish. Then he would wag his finger and say, “Qasem Alku! You’d better behave yourself!”

During such periods, Alku would answer the urgent correspondence as he saw fit. He would write instructions in French, not without grammatical errors. Alku, thus, was the true gateway to the king and much closer to His Majesty than any other individuals of the court or the palace administration. A story has been passed down that serves as a perfect example. When Dabagh Pasha, the prime minister of Egypt, wanted an audience with His Majesty, Alku asked him about the purpose. The prime minister’s face flushed with rage. He found it highly impertinent that he, an Oxford graduate, should have to provide an explanation to a servant. In a delicately sneering patrician tone, he told Alku, “Who has the right to question the prime minister of Egypt when he requests an audience with the king?”

The next day the king summoned the prime minister and deliberately kept him standing. The king gestured toward Alku and said, “I hope that you understand, Pasha, that this man represents Us. Treating him with respect is the equivalent of treating Us with respect.”

The prime minister lowered his head deeply and uttered some words of apology. Thus the supreme status of Alku in the palace was confirmed, and ministers and politicians all continued to curry his favor despite deep resentment that they struggled to hide. For them, Alku was no more than a black servant, a simple valet, ignorant, vulgar, riffraff, but they were careful to keep on his good side due to his endless ability both to create mischief and to be useful. Alku, at will, could cause anyone to gain or lose the king’s favor. He held the keys to the king’s personality and could read his state of mind at any moment. Moreover, Alku had enormous life experience as well as a sharp, instinctive brain that enabled him to see right through people with one glance. One might go so far as to say that his manner of presenting facts and personages to His Majesty should be taught in diplomacy courses. He had only to look at the king to know whether his thinking was going to be clear or muddled, and Alku would appropriately choose to present or withhold matters from him accordingly.

Alku could carry out His Majesty’s orders for days without conferring with him, and at other times he knew by experience that he should ask the king for his opinion. In making his report to the king about a particular person, for example, he never spoke in a straightforward manner but discreetly dropped a fact here and there and repeated certain other people’s views in such a way that the king always ended up reaching a decision that Alku desired. Alku practiced all these skills with the ease and self-assurance of a talented soccer player kicking the ball at the goal from an angle he had practiced a thousand times — and scoring. His role overseeing the king was one side of Alku’s duties, and he had another no less important job: he also oversaw all the servants in all the royal palaces. Second only to God Almighty, he was the sole controller of their lives, their earnings and their fates.

If the palace needed more servants, Alku would send men dressed in the local galabiyya to Aswan and Nubia in the south of Egypt to scour the area for men who fit the bill: intelligent, in good health, fit and of good name. The promising candidates would then be shipped off to Abdin Palace in Cairo, where Alku would look them over and either take them on or order them to be sent back. Just from looking them up and down and having a few short words with them, Alku could spot an impertinent or angry type, a nervy, obstinate reprobate or one addicted to alcohol or hashish, each of which were enough to rule a man right out. The surviving candidates would spend a few months in the two-story school building in the garden of Abdin Palace, learning how to serve in the palace—“l’art du service,” as Alku used to call it in his supercilious French accent. Their training consisted of four rules: