Alaa Al Aswany - Chicago

Donna hung up suddenly and the dial tone buzzed in my ear. I was assailed by apprehensions: Why did she end the call in this manner? What’s she afraid of? Are the police after her? Did they get my telephone number? Will they arrest me on the charge of getting in touch with a prostitution ring? What an inauspicious beginning for my lucky scholarship. I was gripped with anxiety and began to regret the adventure, but I couldn’t go back. I rang up five minutes later. She told me, “Listen, I’ll make you an offer outside the company. Instead of two-fifty, I’ll come myself for only a hundred fifty an hour.”

I hesitated a little as she said, laughing, “This is a special offer from Donna because you’re a handsome Egyptian like Sadat. If I were you, I’d accept it at once.”

“Will you make me happy?”

“I’ll take you to paradise.”

“Okay then.” I gave her the address and we agreed that she’d come at seven o’clock. Before she ended the call, she whispered in a frightened voice, “Your number has been recorded by the company. Someone will contact you to ask you why you didn’t agree to have a woman come to you. Tell them you’ve changed your mind because you’re tired and that you’ll call again tomorrow. Please don’t tell them what we’ve agreed to. I don’t think you’d like me to get hurt.”

And just as she said, a man called and asked me and I gave him the answer she told me to give. He didn’t sound convinced of what I said, but he said good-bye and hung up. Once again I began to worry, but my raging desire, now doubled by the wine, made me forget all other things, to the extent that I ignored the fact that $150 would make a big dent in my budget. There was nothing on my mind except Donna, the beautiful woman I’d make love to. I wondered what she looked like: was she going to be a buxom white woman with full round hips and breasts, like Monica, Clinton’s mistress, or one with a graceful Parisian figure and a dreamy, sparrowlike face like Julia Roberts? Even if she were just like Barbra Streisand, with a slightly long nose and an angular body, I’d be happy. I am not going to dwell on such minor shortcomings. Praise the Lord who created beauty in a hundred ways! I began to get ready for the date a whole hour early. I took another bath, during which I went to extra lengths to clean my body. Then I put a silk robe on my naked body like a lady-killer in Egyptian movies. I am now writing this while gulping down wine. There are only a few minutes before the date. I am sitting, waiting for my beloved Donna, on pins and needles. There, the bell is ringing. My beloved is punctual. How beautiful! I’ll get up to open the door. Gentlemen, what bliss!

As soon as the train stopped, its doors opened and out came the weekend passengers: young lovers embracing, beggars lugging musical instruments that they would soon play on the platforms, drunkards who have been barhopping since yesterday, European tourists carrying tourist guides and maps, young black men dancing to the music blaring from the huge boom boxes they carry, and traditional American families — a father, a mother, and their kids returning from a day in the park. In the corner of the station stood heavyset policemen in their distinctive uniform, with chests thrust forward bearing the badge chicago police, as though deriving their strength from it, with large trained dogs at their side, noses raised, sniffing for drugs. On some occasions, as soon as one of them barks at a passenger, the policemen rush him, immobilize him, and push him toward the wall, uncovering his chest, especially if black, to look for gang tattoos. Then they search him until they find the drugs and place him under arrest. In the midst of this purely American scene, Dr. Ahmad Danana looked totally out of place, as if he were a genie that had just come out of an enchanted bottle, or had disembarked from a time machine, or as if he were an actor who decided to go for a walk in costume. His features are rural Egyptian with a triangular prayer mark in the middle of his forehead, his kinky hair turning gray. He has a large head and very thick glasses, their bluish lenses reflecting his sly eyes in many intersecting circles that often disorient his interlocutors. The prayer beads never leave his hand. Summer or winter he wears full suits that he gets from Mahalla, Egypt, together with cartons of super-size Cleopatra cigarettes to save some money. Danana walks the streets of Chicago in the same manner he took walks for exercise in the late afternoon on the rural road in the village of Shuhada in the Minufiya Governorate, his birthplace. He moves slowly, no matter how much in a hurry he is, looking around with a glance in which suspicion is mixed with arrogance, confidently moving his right foot forward followed by his left, straightening his back, causing his huge potbelly, resulting from his fondness for big rich suppers every night, to stick out.

That is how Ahmad Danana, president of the Egyptian Student Union in America, creates an aura of respectability around himself. The union was established during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s time; several students became presidents and returned afterward to Egypt to hold important state posts. Danana is the only one who became president three years in a row by acclamation. In addition he enjoys several exceptional privileges: he has been preparing for a PhD in histology for the last seven years, even though the law regulating scholarships limits the maximum time to five years. He had gone around that rule by spending two whole years learning English, then another two years studying industrial security at Loyola before beginning the doctoral program at Illinois. And even though the law prohibited work for Egyptian students in the United States, he was able to get a part-time job for a hefty wage that he receives in dollars and transfers to a special account that no one knows anything about at the National Bank in Egypt. He was able, thanks to his connections and the support of the Egyptian embassy, to organize a concert for the popular Egyptian singer Amr Diab that realized for him a fat profit that he added to his savings, amassing a considerable sum of money that enabled him last year to marry the daughter of a rich merchant who owned a big bathroom fixture store in Ruwai‘i, Cairo. All these privileges came on as a result of his close connections with different arms of the Egyptian state. The other students here treat him more like their boss at work than as a fellow student. His older age and his dignified demeanor make him more like a government director general than a student. Besides, he does have control over their affairs, beginning with the Egyptian newspapers and magazines that he distributes among them for free, including his extraordinary ability to help them overcome any obstacle that they confront, and finally his ability to punish and make examples of them. One report from him, confirmed by the Egyptian embassy at once, is enough to get Cairo to cancel the scholarship of the “offending” student.

Danana came out of the station to the street and entered a nearby building. He greeted the old black security guard sitting behind a glass partition, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and opened the door to the apartment. A musty smell resulting from the apartment’s being closed all week long greeted his nose. The living room was small; it had a rectangular sofa and several leather chairs. On the wall was a large picture of the president of the Republic, under which the Throne Verse from the Qur’an in gilded letters was hung, then an Arabic poster whose letters were printed in a small blue font with the title written in the cursive ruq‘a style: egyptian student union in america: the bylaws.

At the end of the corridor were two adjacent rooms, the smaller used by Danana as an office and the other as a meeting room with a rectangular table in the middle with chairs around it. The whole room and the furniture had that old wooden smell of university lecture halls and classrooms in Egyptian schools. Actually, even though the apartment was in Chicago, it had mysteriously acquired an Egyptian bureaucratic character that reminded one of the Mugamma building in Tahrir Square or the old court building in Bab al-Khalq. Danana sat at the head of the table, watching the students as they came into the meeting room. They greeted him with respect and took their places around the table while he took time, in a ponderously royal manner, before he returned their greetings in a hoarse voice and a tone somewhere between standoffish and welcoming, knitting his brow and assuming the pose of a high-ranking state official, busy with grave matters that couldn’t be postponed or divulged. Danana looked at the students sitting around the table, then he struck the table with his hand, whereupon all the whispering ended and a profound silence fell. He broke that silence by clearing his throat, an act that usually preceded his speaking and usually ended with a fit of coughing as a result of his excessive smoking. He extended his hand and turned on the tape recorder in front of him. Then his hoarse voice reverberated clearly and strongly in the room: “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate, and prayers and peace on the noblest of creation, our master, the Messenger of God, the one chosen by God, peace be upon him. I welcome you to the Egyptian Student Union in America, Chicago Chapter. We are all present today with the exception of Shaymaa Muhammadi and Tariq Haseeb. Shaymaa had a big problem this morning.”