Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

Wright rattled off this whole speech looking out of the window. When he turned around, Odette had already picked up her handbag and was heading for the door. Wright sprang after her and grabbed her by the arm, but she pulled away.

“Leave me alone.”

“Odette, please listen.”

“How can I be involved with a racist like you? I don’t understand how I agreed to it in the first place. Fire Abdoun or beat him. Do what you want. I don’t care. But you’ll never see me again.”

He tried to hold on to her, but she wriggled out of his grip and slammed the door behind her. Sinking into the chair, Wright felt dizzy. He’d had a lot to drink and felt overwhelmed by the events of the day. And now Odette had stormed out on him just because he objected to Abdoun’s behavior. Who was this Abdoun that he could so affect Odette? Why was she so worked up over a menial? A thought he had long been trying to suppress came back to him. What sort of relationship did they have with each other anyway? Was this Negro bedding her and giving her so much satisfaction that she did not need another lover? He was even younger than Odette by several years!

Wright could not completely dispel his anxieties. An affair between Abdoun and Odette seemed improbable, but experience had taught him to not discount the implausible. Abdoun was a handsome young man, and some women are attracted to their social inferiors. They lust for servants, drivers and waiters just as some men run after maids and cooks. He shut his eyes and leaned back in the chair, a bitter taste in his mouth. Why had Odette run out on him? He had longed to go to bed with her, even if just one last time. But his feelings were mixed. He loved her but resented her too. He adored her but hated the weakness she made him show. Sometimes he regretted not having met her when he was younger so that he could have married her and spent his life with her, but other times he wished he had never met her. Thinking back to their last conversation, he wondered, “How could she speak to me so haughtily? Does she think I have no dignity? That she thinks she won’t lose me no matter what she says or does. She may have led other lovers by the nose, but I’m a different kettle of fish.”

The alcohol was making Wright bolder. “It’s time I behaved like a man. If Odette doesn’t want me, I won’t be begging her. I won’t die if she leaves me. To hell with it all.”

He had not behaved badly toward her. It was she who had flared up for no reason. If she expected him to run after her, she was delusional. He resolved not to call her again.

He went home feeling better for his resolve. The following day he went to work as usual. He tried to focus on his work, but it was no use. He could not help but think of Odette, seeing and hearing her in a hundred different settings. He could feel the warmth of her body melt him away.

“Naturally, it’ll take me a little time to get over her,” he told himself.

That evening, as he was sipping a whiskey at the Club bar, he started thinking it over. Had it been worth having that argument with Odette? Hadn’t he shown her too much wrath? Even if he was in the right, even if he had decided to break it off with her, wasn’t it wrong simply to drop out of her life? Wasn’t that a childish way to react? Why not call her and dump her as she had dumped him, making her see her stubbornness and his rectitude? If he could just have a few words with her, she would regret her actions, and that would be worth the effort. He decided to call her, not because he missed her but simply to apprise her of his decision. It would be a lesson she would never forget. He would dent her illusions in just a few words, giving her to understand her rash stupidity. Then he would simply put the receiver down.

He picked up the telephone and asked for the number, and the moment he heard her voice, he said, “Odette.”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. I think that you’re right. We should end it.”

“Good.”

She said the word calmly and hung up. He was stunned. He had expected her to say more, to get angry and start a quarrel. Then he would have told her how wrong she had been, and she would have told him her side of the argument, but she had not even given him a chance. He was befuddled completely. After another glass of whiskey, he called again, but this time she did not answer. Frantic now, he tried to call her again, holding the receiver to his ear until the ringing tone cut off, then hanging up and trying again. He went back to his seat in the bar and drank another glass, asked for the bill and tried to steady himself. He had drunk too much. He got in his car, and half an hour later he was standing in front of her apartment. He rang the bell a few times. Finally, the door opened. He moved forward, and she stepped back to let him in. She closed the door behind him, and in a voice that seemed to come from someone else, he said, “Odette, I’m so sorry for the way I behaved yesterday. Please forgive me. Don’t leave me. I love you.”

Even if Mahmud Gaafar did have difficulty understanding things and could not express himself clearly, he still had feelings the same as everyone else. The death of his father had been a great shock to him. He had cried like a child all the way to the cemetery. He missed his father’s gentle love and his patience with Mahmud’s repeated failures at school. He no longer remembered those two times when he had done something so stupid that his father had thrashed him, recalling only his father’s disappointed affection. Mahmud felt lost, as if his life’s mainstay had gone. His grief over his father was heartfelt, though he still used it as an excuse to skip school. At the start, his mother thought this was a natural response, but after he’d been two weeks at home, she brought him breakfast in bed, then kissed him on the forehead with a doleful look and said, “Death has come upon us, son, but you have got to go back to school and work hard to try to achieve what your late father wanted for you. He wanted to see you finish school.”

Mahmud sighed, looked downcast and answered, “How can you think about school, Mother? At a time like this. I couldn’t cope with it.”

His mother kept at him, and finally, just to end the discussion, he responded, “All right. Let’s see how it goes.”

After that, two or three times a week at most, he would leave the apartment at the start of the school day, and as was his wont, he would spend the day in the café or playing soccer on the triangle, then grab his school books and go home.

Gradually, his mother stopped badgering him about school. The sudden death of her husband had drained her so that she no longer had the energy to worry about Mahmud, who she knew would give up school completely sooner or later. Perhaps she thought that the money spent on lazy Mahmud’s school fees would be better spent for something else. So Umm Said stopped badgering and achieved a sort of peaceful coexistence with her son. When Comanus came to ask for two sons of the deceased to work with him at the Automobile Club, Mahmud was enthusiastic, seeing the job at the Club as putting an end to school for good. No one could reasonably ask him to go to school if he had a decent job. Before taking it, Mahmud had listened carefully to his mother’s and his brother Kamel’s advice, and his dark face appeared almost happy.

“Mahmud, work is not like going to school,” Kamel said. “You can’t skip it. If you don’t turn up, they’ll fire you immediately.”

“Son,” Umm Said added, “at work you’re going to be around people who don’t know you. You have to be polite and nice to them all. If someone says something you don’t like, take a deep breath. God has given you a strong body, and if you get into a fight, you might kill someone, and what a catastrophe that would be! May God protect you, son.”