Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

Hameed went up to Idris, now restrained, and started slapping him. Hameed had a singular technique, which was to raise his hands on either side of the servant’s face and then slap him with each hand in turn. Occasionally, he would deliver a resounding slap with both hands. This achieved the highest degree of humiliation and pain. After the first round of slapping, Idris received another one, and as Hameed started to get carried away with himself, his face flushed, his eyes bulging and teeth grinding. By some additional bit of bad luck, Idris suddenly cried out, “Enough! Shame on you.”

Hameed was startled. He stepped back, and panting with exhilaration, he said, “Shame? I’ll teach you the meaning of shame!”

Hameed looked toward Alku, who made an almost imperceptible gesture, such as an impresario might give the musicians to ready them for an encore. Springing forward, Hameed showed himself surprisingly agile for his large frame. He picked up a short, rough stick and started waving it. The two servants holding Idris knew what they had to do. They pulled him roughly and pushed him down onto a bench, taking off his shoes and socks. Then as they held Idris’s legs, Hameed pursed his lips and grimaced before raising the stick as high as he could and bringing it down with full force on the soles of the surly servant’s feet…

At that time, my emotions were in turmoil, and I was reeling from one extreme to another. I could feel overwhelmingly happy and optimistic and full of self-confidence, and then suddenly, for no reason, I would lose my enthusiasm and a sense of gloom sapped my will to do anything at all. I would withdraw into myself, alone in my room sprawled out on my bed, reading, smoking and giving myself over to my restless imagination. I imagined myself performing deeds of chivalry and self-sacrifice, saving an innocent girl from a gang of evil men or helping a stricken friend so generously that his eyes welled up with tears of gratitude. I saw myself as the hero of some tragedy who displays nothing but generosity and courage to all with a steady gait and a steadfast heart as fate lies in wait to drag him to meet his destiny. Sometimes I thought of our house as a theater. I would watch my siblings coming out of their bedrooms and walking around as if they were actors performing their roles. It was like watching them from behind a glass partition. Sometimes I felt that I was experiencing a life that I had already lived, as if everything around me was already hidden away in the recesses of my memory. With all such emotions burning inside me, I felt the power of poetry for the first time. I wrote a poem, which was published in the magazine of the College of Law and for which some of my fellow students expressed their appreciation.

When suffering my own ups and downs or lost in my untrammeled imagination, I felt sad about what was going on in our house.

My mother had admitted the truth to me: our father had come from Upper Egypt after losing all his money and was working as a storeroom clerk to support us. As if he were living with chronic pain, my father’s face was holding something back. Even when laughing or speaking about something cheerful, his expression was still dark and ominous. I felt bad that he was going through this ordeal. I wished I could help him and thought about looking for some work in addition to my studies. But when I suggested this to my mother, she responded firmly, “Your only job is to study and graduate.”

My feelings of responsibility to my family weighed on me heavily. I could not let them down. I was their emissary to the future, the focus of their unshatterable hope. I can never forget my first day at university. I had had a haircut, shaved and put on some aftershave as well as a new suit. My father got up early to wish me well, and seeing me off, he smiled and said, “Good-bye, professor! May God keep your every step safe.”

It seemed to me that he was fighting back tears. The responsibility I felt spurred me on to study as hard as possible. I was always on time for lectures, seated in the front row and taking meticulous notes, which I would study thoroughly. I received outstanding grades for my first-year examinations. My father’s face beamed with joy, whereas my mother, concerned to avert the evil eye, made me walk seven times through smoke issuing from an incense burner. I started my second year enthusiastically, longing to graduate so that I could work and share the burden with my father.

My brother Said, who was two years older, was a different sort altogether, and we almost never agreed with each other on any subject. Said never thought about anything but himself, and furthermore, he had a supercilious nature. One day he came into our bedroom, sat down in front of me and, in a tone of derision, asked me out of the blue, “Does your father still think that he’s a landowner in Daraw?”

“You should have some respect when speaking about our father!”

“Can you explain to me what is going on in this house?”

“What have you got to complain about?”

“Look, we are going through hard times. There’s hardly enough money for food and our school fees, but all the same, your father keeps on paying for hordes of jobless Upper Egyptians to stay here.”

“Those Upper Egyptians are our relatives, and they are not jobless. They are in Cairo to arrange some things.”

“Are you trying to convince me that our father is responsible for the whole population of Daraw?”

“He is.”

“How ridiculous. He should be spending his money on us first.”

“The duty to look after your own people is obviously too honorable for you ever to understand.”

“It’s exactly those delusions that have bankrupted our father.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll say what I want.”

We were always quarreling like that. Said felt aggrieved that his younger brother had been accepted at university whereas he was at a technical college, and he blamed our father for his own failure — it is always easier to blame someone else. It was hardly our father’s fault that Said neglected his studies and had to repeat two years at school and even then received poor marks on his secondary-school certificate. Said’s sense of persecution turned into aggression. Except for our father, no one at home was safe from his outbursts. He would argue with me, boss around our mother and hit Mahmud for no reason, and when it came to poor Saleha, his rage was boundless. Just last week, she left the door of her bedroom ajar and was lying on the bed in her nightgown, reading a textbook. Said made a huge fuss, wiping the floor with her, accusing her of having no manners because she was lying on her stomach with the bedroom door open. He screamed in her face until she started shaking and would have hit her had I not grabbed his hand. I deeply resented the endless bickering, but I do not dislike my brother Said.

These were the focal points of my life: university and home, our rocky finances and my father’s struggle to support us, my fertile imagination, my repressed desires and my forays into poetry. Never for a moment did I doubt that I would one day graduate, get a job and support my family. My life stretched out before me like a long road, but I could see where it led. Then, suddenly, it changed course. It is strange how that can happen unexpectedly due to some small matter or a passing word, going down some street at a particular hour or turning right instead of left or appearing late for work and bumping into someone — any such thing has the potential to change everything.

It was a Wednesday. I will never forget it. Our professor had canceled a lecture, so I decided to go home for lunch before the afternoon classes. As I was leaving the lecture hall, some of my classmates stopped me and invited me to go and hear a talk by Hasan al-Mu’min, chairman of the Wafd Party at the university. Politics did not really interest me, and I begged off, but one of the students taunted me, “Pull yourself together, Kamel. Are you afraid of being arrested?”