Alaa Al Aswany - The Yacoubian Building

Little Hatim spent a lot of time with the servants, and his parents (being always busy) would often send him with one of them to the Gezira Club or the cinema. Among the many servants in the house, little Hatim was particularly fond of the steward Idris, with his flowing white caftan, broad red cummerbund and tall fez, and his tall, strong, slim body, his handsome brown face, his intelligent, bright eyes, and his beaming smile from which his gleaming, white, regular teeth shone out. It was Idris’s habit to sit with Hatim in his large room overlooking Suleiman Basha, playing with his toys with him, telling him stories about animals, singing beautiful Nubian songs to him and translating for him what they meant. Idris’s voice would tremble and the tears would glisten in his eyes when he spoke to him of his mother and his brothers and sisters and his village that they had taken him away from when he was young to go work in people’s houses. Hatim loved Idris and their relationship grew till they were spending many hours together every day, and when Idris started kissing Hatim on his face and neck and whispering, “You’re beautiful. I love you,” Hatim felt no revulsion or fear. On the contrary, the burning sensation that his friend’s breath left on his body excited him. They continued to exchange kisses until one day Idris asked him to take off his clothes. Hatim was nine at the time and felt embarrassed and confused, but in the end he gave in to the insistence of his friend. The latter was so aroused by the sight of his smooth, white body that during the encounter he sobbed with pleasure and whispered incomprehensible Nubian words. Idris, despite his lust and vigor, entered Hatim’s body gently and carefully and asked him to tell him if he felt the slightest pain. This approach was so successful that when Hatim now thinks back to that first time with Idris, the same strange, piercing sensation that he knew that day for the first time comes back to him but he cannot remember feeling any distress at all.

When Idris was finished, he turned Hatim to face him and kissed him ardently on the lips, then looked into his eyes and said, “I did that because I love you. If you love me, don’t tell anyone what happened. If you tell them, they’ll beat you and throw me out and your father may put me in prison or kill me and you’ll never see me again.”

Hatim’s relationship with Idris lasted years, until Dr. Rasheed suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage caused by overwork and his widow was obliged to get rid of many of the servants because of the expense. Idris left the house and nothing more was heard of him. His absence affected Hatim so much psychologically that that year he got a poor score in the general secondary exam. Thereafter he plunged into his tumultuous homosexual life and two years later his mother passed away.

This released him from the last constraint on his pleasures. He had inherited a solid income which along with his reasonable salary from the newspaper underwrote an opulent lifestyle. He redid the large apartment in the Yacoubian Building to liberate it from its traditional style, turning it into something closer to a Bohemian artist’s studio than the home of an established family. It was now in his power to invite lovers to share his bed for days and sometimes months at a time. Hatim had relationships with many men and left them for a variety of reasons, but his covert, sinful desire remained forever linked to Idris the steward and, as a man searches among women for the image of his first love, with whom he first became acquainted with pleasure, so Hatim sought among all other men for Idris — the rough-hewn, primitive male whom civilization had not refined, and with all the hardness, crudity, and vigor that such a man represented. He never ceased thinking about Idris and often would relive, with a delicious, burning tenderness, his feeling as he lay facedown on the floor of his room (like a little rabbit surrendering itself to its fate) following with his eyes the Persian designs drawn on the carpet as Idris’s hot, bursting body clung to his, wringing it and melting it. The strange thing was that their sexual encounters, many as they were, always ended up on the floor and they never got into the bed, a fact probably attributable to Idris’s feelings of insignificance as a servant and his psychological inability to use his master’s bed even when having sexual intercourse with him.

It had happened one night a few months ago that drunkenness got the better of Hatim and an implacable urge to have sex had swept over him. He left his apartment and wandered the downtown area. It was ten o’clock (the hour when the police privates change guard, one known to every Downtown homosexual as the hour at which they rush to meet their lovers among them) and Hatim was looking over the simple conscripts as they prepared to quit their shift when he saw Abd Rabbuh (who looked a lot like Idris). He got him into the car, gave him money, and kept fondling him until he succeeded in seducing him.

Later Abd Rabbuh made many violent attempts to put an end to his relationship with Hatim, who was well aware from his long experience in homosexual love that the active homosexual who is just starting out, such as Abd Rabbuh, is usually possessed by a terrible sense of sin that soon develops into bitterness and black hatred for the passive homosexual who seduces him. He was also aware that the homosexual experience when repeated and the savoring of its sensual pleasures turn bit by bit into genuine desire on the part of the active partner, however much he may hate it and shy away from it at the beginning. As a result, Hatim and Abduh’s relationship swung from attempts at separation to reunions.

Yesterday Abduh had left Chez Nous to escape from Hatim, but Hatim had caught up with him and insisted until he went with him to the apartment, where they had drunk a whole bottle of strong French wine together before making love — and now here was Hatim the next morning lying stretched out in the bathtub, surrendering himself to the jets of hot water spurting from the showerhead which felt to his body like armies of delicious ants, while he recalled, smiling, his passionate night with Abduh, whose body, its lust inflamed by the wine, had been wrung by numerous, successive spasms. Hatim stood up to dry himself in front of the mirror and clean his private parts with care, applying scented cream, then wrapped himself in a rose cashmere dressing gown, left the bathroom for the bedroom, and settled down to watch Abduh as he slept — his dark brown face, his thick lips, his snub Negroid nose, and the heavy eyebrows that gave his face its stern cast. He bent over him and kissed him and Abduh awoke and opened his eyes slowly.

“Good morning! Bonjour! ” whispered Hatim gently, smiling at Abduh, who sat up a little and leaned against the back of the bed, revealing his broad, dark chest covered with a forest of thick hair. Hatim pursued him with kisses, but Abduh pushed his face away with his hand, then looked downward and said bitterly as though breaking into a lament, “Hatim Bey, I’m in a real mess. Any day now the officer will refer me for punishment.”

“Abduh! Do we have to start talking about the officer again? I told you not to worry. I’ve found someone who can put in a good word for you with him, a very important general in the Ministry.”

“By the time you talk to him, I’ll have been flung in prison. My wife and little boy back in the village live off what I earn, Excellency. I wish I could get out of the army right away — if I go to prison, my family will be done for.”

Hatim gazed at him tenderly and smiled. Then he got up slowly, went over to his small purse, took out a hundred-pound note, and thrust it toward him, saying, “Here. Send this to your wife and son, and if they ask for anything from me, I’ll take care of it for you. Tomorrow I’ll meet my relative the general and we’ll put in a word for you with the officer. Just please, for my sake, don’t upset yourself, Abduh.”