Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

Umm Said had been trumped. She had not expected Aisha to agree to such austere conditions attached to the marriage. There was nothing to say. Umm Said got up to leave, and Aisha gave her a joyful hug and kiss as she walked with her to the door. Umm Said now felt that it had all been a clever trap laid by that wily Aisha and her coquettish daughter and that her son Said had fallen into it, dragging his mother along with him. Aisha had planned and executed the scheme with such cool calculation. She had stood by her so magnanimously after the death of Abd el-Aziz. Then she had sent over her useless daughter to seduce that fool of a boy, Said, and get her claws into him. And now, after all that, Aisha was agreeing to every last condition for the wedding. What a scheming cow she was.

The next Wednesday, the fatiha was read out, and the rings exchanged. The bride’s family had been as obliging as possible on the subject of the dowry, saying that financial matters were the furthest from their mind and that they were only interested in their daughter’s happiness. Aisha gave Umm Said no opportunity to disagree with her, except for one worrying thing that happened. Aisha was visiting Umm Said and let drop that Said had decided to open a savings account with her to set a little aside once he started his job in Tanta. Umm Said’s face turned ashen, but she made no comment.

When she was alone with Said in the apartment, however, she could not control herself and confronted him, “So you intend to start a savings account with Aisha…”

Said looked at her as if to say, “What of it?”

“Please God.” He nodded. “As soon as I have a job and get my first salary.”

His mother stomped over to him, and had he not been taller than her, she would have slapped him.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she shouted hoarsely. “You know we’re short of money. Instead of thinking to help us, you’re saving to help them?”

“It’s not a big thing,” Said said with a smile.

That was his way. He did whatever he wanted and then faced the reactions with complete sangfroid. Once he had decided on a plan of action, there was no reason to get emotional about it. His mother would rant and rave and start crying, but then she would calm down, and that would be the end of the matter.

The preparations for the marriage were going full steam ahead, and two weeks later, on the appointed day, they all went to Friday prayers at the Sayyida Zeinab mosque. As agreed, only the closest relatives were invited. There were no signs of celebration. Umm Said, Aisha and Saleha were still in their mourning clothes. The bride wore a beautiful blue dress with sequins on the sleeves and around the neck. Mahmud, Fawzy, Kamel and the bridegroom, Said, all wore new suits. Ali Hamama, the father of the bride, was beaming in his new brown worsted overcoat, made of English wool, which he wore over a fine beige and brown striped galabiyya, a stark change from his usually unremarkable appearance. In fact, he looked like an actor who was going to take off his glitzy costume the moment the play ended and go back to his shabby everyday clothing. The officiating cleric was a stout man with a compact face so perfectly round that it might have been drawn with a compass.

Ali Hamama reached out and took Said’s hand under a white handkerchief, and then he repeated after the cleric, “I give you my daughter, Fayeqa, who is a virgin of sound mind, according to the religion of God and his Prophet and the rite of Imam Abu Hanifa al-Nu’man, and in accordance with the agreed dowry.”

Instead of the ululations that usually pierce the air at this moment during Egyptian weddings, there was silence. The guests shyly whispered their congratulations, and Umm Said burst out crying. From the moment she entered the mosque, she had been trying to hold herself together, but just when the marriage contract was signed, she broke down. Who could have imagined that Abd el-Aziz, her cousin and her beloved husband, would die in his fifties and not be present at the wedding of his eldest son? How happy he would have been. Would that have been too much to have asked? Would it have upset the order of the world had Abd el-Aziz lived a few years longer and been able to witness his children’s weddings and to know his grandchildren? “May God forgive me,” she kept repeating through her tears. Affected by her mother, Saleha started crying too, followed swiftly by tears from Aisha, genuine or not. Saleha took out a white handkerchief and dabbed her eyes as the male guests tried to comfort the women. When the formalities were over, they all went outside, creating the highly unusual sight of two families departing in silence after the signing of a marriage contract. Fayeqa’s face had none of the dreaminess that one usually sees on a bride, only the steely look of a victor, or an exultant student, who, having studied hard, had gone up to the dais to receive an award. Indeed, Fayeqa had waged a long and hard campaign for the husband who was now standing beside her. She had used every ruse in the book to hitch Said, letting him see what charms were on offer and then retracting them until he submitted. She really felt for him whenever he stood before her almost weeping with desire, pleading with her to give herself to him. She had felt like a mother who had to be cruel to her child in order to be kind. She had done a lot in order to marry Said, and without a moment’s hesitation, she had foregone what all girls dream of: a white wedding dress, a party and the throne that the bride and groom sit on in front of all the guests. She had known both instinctively and from her mother’s advice that any delay in the wedding might see the opportunity slip away forever. Her mother’s voice rang in her ears: “A girl who knows what she’s doing has to bend with the breeze. Obey your mother-in-law. Don’t think of crossing her until the contract is signed.”

After the marriage, the couple spent a week in the Anglo Hotel on Soliman Pasha Street, courtesy of Uncle Ali Hamama, the bride’s father, who deemed this such an unprecedented and historic act of generosity that later he would keep throwing it back in his wife’s face whenever they had an argument. After the honeymoon, the couple carried on living separately in their respective families’ apartments until Said started his job as a teacher in the vocational school in Tanta, where he rented a two-room apartment in al-Geysh Street. As the train gave off a long whistle and left the station carrying the couple to Tanta, then and only then did Said Gaafar’s real life start. He would later feel that his whole life had been no more than a lead-up to his life with Fayeqa. She blossomed in a way that astonished him. From the very first days, she proved her superiority as a lover, a friend, a wife and a lady of the house. He discovered that she was a wonderful cook who never tired of spending long hours in the kitchen. If she tasted a new dish or even heard about one from him, she would not rest until she had found the recipe and mastered it.

She also managed to stretch the modest house budget, which he handed over to her on the first of the month, after first paying a percentage of his salary into the shared savings account. Bit by bit, she acquired everything they needed for the apartment. She bought a Philips radio and a Singer sewing machine on installments. Using the money in the savings account, she bought a beautiful suite for the sitting room and even managed to save a little for a rainy day. She insisted on saving a maid’s salary by doing all the dusting, cleaning and washing herself, making sure to keep her hands soft with lemon moisturizing cream. Fayeqa turned the apartment into a perfect little home, so clean that it sparkled.

All the energy expended on her homemaking skills, however, had no effect whatsoever on her sex drive. Marriage freed her from any feelings of guilt, and now Said discovered just how good she was in bed. She had all the right ingredients: she was beautiful and soft, she took care of her body, she was voracious and she gave her husband pleasure any which way he wanted, without a shred of inhibition. Had he not been absolutely certain that he was the first man in her life, he might have thought that she was a woman who had learned the art of love from practice. He remembered something she had let slip one day. She told him her mother had explained to her all about sexual relations because most marital quarrels, according to Aisha, could eventually be sorted out in bed if the wife was sufficiently skilled. Fayeqa allowed her husband free rein and played out all his sordid and dirty fantasies so well that at work and outside the apartment he never looked at other women. But all this delirious pleasure came with a price: Fayeqa learned how to whip him up into a frenzy of desire that she would satisfy only when she had him completely under her control. Said tried to avoid ever upsetting her, as he found her anger hard to bear. The couple’s ecstatic physical relationship gradually made them like two footballers scoring goal after goal or a vocal duet whose harmonies take a song to a new level. Fayeqa could now tell her husband’s state of mind from a single glance, from the expressions on his face, his tone of voice, his gait or even the way he was sitting.