Alaa Al Aswany - The Yacoubian Building

By means of such thoughts he had tried to wipe the image of Souad from his memory, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, and he had thrown himself into the maelstrom of his work in order to forget. With the opening of the Tasso automobile agency due in a few days he had set up an operations room in his office with his sons Fawzi and Quadri. As though going to war, he had overseen the preparations for the huge party at the Hotel Semiramis, personally inviting all the big shots in the city. All had come — present and former ministers, high ranking civil servants, and editors-in-chief of the main national newspapers, their friendship costing him dozens of cars that he gave away free or for a symbolic price. This was done with the agreement of the Japanese officials and sometimes at their suggestion.

The party went on to a late hour with the television broadcasting bits of it as paid advertisements and the newspapers giving it full coverage. A well-known economic columnist at al-Akhbar newspaper wrote a piece presenting the opening of the Tasso agency as a courageous, patriotic step, boldly undertaken by the authentically Egyptian businessman Hagg Azzam to break the monopoly by Western cars. The columnist urged all Egyptian businessmen to choose the same righteous, difficult path as Hagg Azzam for the sake of Egypt’s rebirth and the health of its economy. For two whole weeks the newspapers were filled with pictures of Hagg Azzam and statements by him. The picture that was published of the signing of the contract for the agency was exceptionally expressive in that it showed Hagg Azzam with his huge body, plebeian face, and darting, cunning glances and sitting next to him Mr. Yen Ki, chairman of Tasso’s board with his slight Japanese build, his straightforward look, and his serious, refined face — as though the difference between the two men epitomized the vast distance between what happens in Japan and what happens in Egypt.

From the first months the agency realized incredible sales exceeding all expectations, the profits pouring down on Hagg Azzam, who received his Lord’s grace with gratitude, paying out from them tens of thousands of pounds in charity. The Japanese side offered Azzam additional projects for service stations in Cairo and Alexandria and Hagg Azzam lived his most glorious days ever with only one thing to spoil them, something he had tried to ignore but in vain. El Fouli had hounded him for a meeting and Azzam kept putting him off till he could do so no longer. In the end, he agreed and went to meet El Fouli at the Sheraton, having prepared himself ahead of time for a difficult interview.

The hallway, dark in the middle of the day and crowded to overflowing, appeared more like the third-class car of a train to Upper Egypt than the reception area of a hospital: the women were standing, loaded with their sick children, the smell of sweat was stifling, the floor and walls were filthy, the few male nurses who were organizing entry to the examination room were abusing the women and shoving them, and there was endless fighting, screaming, and tumult. Hatim Rasheed and Abduh, along with Hidiya, arrived carrying the child, who never stopped crying. They stood for a while in the crowd and then Hatim went up to one of the nurses and asked to meet the director of the hospital. The nurse looked at him with annoyance and told him the director wasn’t there. Abduh almost got into a fight with him when the nurse told him that he had to wait his turn for the child to be seen. Hatim then went out to the nearest public telephone and called several numbers from the small notebook that he always kept in his pocket with the result that the hospital’s deputy director came out to them and received them warmly, apologizing for the absence of the director. The deputy director was a fat man with a pale complexion whose face gave an impression of good-heartedness and straightforwardness. He examined the child carefully, then said in an anxious voice, “Unfortunately, the case is advanced and critical. The boy is dehydrated and feverish.”

He wrote out some papers, which he gave to Abduh, who was a nervous wreck, smoking incessantly and railing at his wife. Then he took the child in his arms and ran with the nurse, to whom the doctor’s concern over the case had transmitted itself, and they put the child in the intensive care ward. Glucose tubes were put into his small arms, but his face was extremely pale, his eyes sunken, and his crying was getting softer. Everyone felt heavily despondent. In response to Abduh’s question, the nurse said, “The treatment will begin to show results after at least two hours. Our Lord is merciful.”

Silence reigned again and Hidiya started to cry quietly. Hatim took Abduh aside, thrust a bundle of banknotes into his pocket, and patted him on the shoulder saying, “Take these, Abduh, for the hospital charges and if you need anything, please call me. I have to go to the paper. I’ll call you to find out how you’re doing tonight.”

“I wish I’d met you a long time ago!”

“Why?”

“My life would have been completely different.”

“You’re still alive. Go ahead and change it.”

“Change what, Busayna? I’m sixty-five years old. ‘The End,’ you know.”

“Who says? You could live another twenty, thirty years. It’s God that decides how long people live.”

“That would be nice. One would really like to live another thirty years, at least.”

They laughed together, he in his husky voice, she in her repeated, melodious chirrups. They were lying naked on the bed and he was holding her in his arms enjoying the touch of her smooth, thick hair on his arm. They had freed themselves utterly from any feeling of the privacy of each other’s bodies and would spend hours completely naked. She would make him coffee and prepare his glasses of whisky and hors d’œuvres and from time to time they would sleep together. He might make love to her, but often they would just lie like that. He would turn off the light in the room and watch her face in the low, tremulous light that came from the street. At such moments she appeared unreal to him, a beautiful apparition, a night creature that with the first light of dawn would disappear as suddenly as it had come. They would talk, her voice in the darkness sounding deep, sweet, and warm. In a serious tone she said, staring at the ceiling, “When are we leaving?”

“Leaving for where?”

“You promised me we’d go somewhere together.”

Gazing at her face, he asked her, “You still hate this country?”

She nodded her head, looking at the ceiling.

“I can’t fathom your generation. In my day, love for one’s country was like a religion. Lots of young people died struggling against the British.”

Busayna sat up and said, “You made demonstrations to throw out the British? Okay, they went. Does that mean the country’s all right?”

“The reason the country’s gone downhill is the absence of democracy. If there were a real democratic system, Egypt would be a great power. Egypt’s curse is dictatorship and dictatorship inevitably leads to poverty, corruption, and failure in all fields.”

“That’s big talk. I dream in my own size. I want to live comfortably and have a family. A husband who loves me, children to raise, and a lovely, comfy little home instead of living on the roof. I’d like to go to a decent country, where there’s no dirt, no poverty, and no injustice. You know, the brother of one of my friends failed the general secondary exam three years in a row. Then he went off to Holland, married a Dutch woman, and settled down there. He tells us that overseas there’s no injustice and doing people out of what’s theirs, like here. There everyone gets what’s his and people respect one another. Even the sweeper in the street gets respect. That’s why I want to go abroad. I want to live there and work and become really respectable. Earn my living from my work instead of going to the storeroom with someone like Talal so that he’ll give me ten pounds. Just think — he used to give me ten pounds a time, the cost of two packs of Marlboros. I was really stupid.”