Alaa Al Aswany - Chicago

“No.”

“Rush Street is the young people’s favorite street in Chicago. It has the most popular bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. On weekends, young men and women come out to the street to dance and drink until dawn, a kind of communal celebration of the end of a week of work. Look.”

I looked to where he was pointing and saw several policemen on horseback. They looked strange against the giant skyscrapers in the background. Karam said, laughing, “In the late hours of the night, when drunkenness and revelry reach their peak, Chicago police resort to the mounted detail to disperse the drunks. When I was young, an American friend taught me how to provoke a horse. We would drink and go out on the street, and when the mounted force came to disperse us, I would sneak behind the horse and prod it in such a way that it would neigh and get agitated and gallop away.”

He parked the car and locked it. I walked next to him, dazzled by the neon lights glittering on and off endlessly, making the whole street look more like a large nightclub. Suddenly we heard a voice behind us, “Just a moment, sir.”

I stopped to look at the source of the sound, but Karam grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, “Keep walking. Don’t look behind and don’t talk to anyone.”

His tone was stern, so I acquiesced. He moved faster, with me in tow. Before long there appeared beside us a tall, thin young black man, his hair cascading down his shoulders in intersecting braids. He was wearing bracelets on his arms and chains on his chest that jangled as he moved. He said, “Hey, man. You want some pot?”

“No, thank you,” Karam answered quickly, but the young man persisted,“I have some excellent stuff that’ll make you see the world as it is.”

“Thank you. We don’t like pot.”

Karam stopped and so did I. We remained standing on the sidewalk as we were. The young man walked in front of us, jangling until he disappeared down a side street. It was then that Karam started walking again, saying, “You have to be careful with those guys. They’re usually under the influence and one of them might fool you with this pot business until you take out the money from your pocket, which he would then snatch and maybe hurt you.”

I remained silent and he asked me, “Are you tense because of what happened?”

“Of course.”

He laughed loudly and said, “What happened is quite ordinary. People face it here every day. You’re in Chicago, my friend. Here we are.”

We entered an elegant two-story building with a lighted electric sign saying piano bar. The place had soft lights throughout and there were tall round tables scattered all over. At the end of the room there was a black man wearing a tuxedo and playing the piano. We sat at a nearby table and Karam said, “I hope you like this place. I prefer quiet bars. I can no longer stand noisy dance clubs. It’s a sign of old age.”

A beautiful blond waitress came over, and when I ordered a glass of wine, he asked me in surprise, “You still want to drink? I haven’t recovered from last night’s drinking.”

“Me too, but one or two glasses will make me okay. This is a well-known way of getting over a hangover — to drink a little the following day. Abu Nuwas said, ‘Treat me with that which made me sick.’”

Dr. Karam picked up a piece of paper from the table and took out of his pocket a gold pen and said, “Wasn’t Abu Nuwas the poet famous for his poetry on wine during the Abbasid period?”

“Exactly.”

“Can you repeat that verse? I’d like to write it down.”

He wrote it down quickly then said as he put the pen in his pocket, “I’ll have a drink like you to get rid of the headache.”

We were avoiding looking at each other, as if we had suddenly remembered the quarrel. He took a large sip of whiskey and sighed, saying, “I am sorry, Nagi.”

“It was I who wronged you.”

“We were both drunk and we fought and it’s over. But I’ve come tonight for something else.” He was carrying a small valise in his hand. He placed it between us on the round marble table, then put on his gold-framed glasses and took out a sheaf of papers. “Here, please.”

“What’s this?”

“Something I want you to read.” The lights were dim and I had a headache, so I said, “With your permission, may I read it later?”

“No, now, please.” I moved a little to the right so I could get closer to the light.

The papers were written in Arabic. I began to read, “A proposal submitted by Dr. Karam Doss, professor of open heart surgery at Northwestern University, to the College of Medicine, Ain Shams University.”

He didn’t let me finish reading. He leaned his elbows on the table and said, “I submitted this proposal last year to Ain Shams University.”

He ordered another drink and continued enthusiastically, “I’m now a big name in heart surgery. My fees for each operation are very high. And yet I offered the officials at Ain Shams Medical School Hospital my services, to perform operations for free for a month every year. I wanted to help poor patients and transfer to Egypt advanced surgery techniques.”

“That’s great.”

“More than that. I submitted a proposal to establish a modern surgery unit that would have cost them next to nothing. I was going to secure funding for them through my connections with American universities and research centers.”

“Excellent idea!” I exclaimed, my sense of guilt increasing. “Do you know what their answer was?”

“Of course they welcomed it.” He laughed. “They didn’t reply and when I called the dean of Ain Shams Medical School, he said my idea was not feasible at this time.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

He took another sip of his drink, and it seemed to me that he was having a hard time concentrating. I knew that drinking again after a hangover got rid of the headache, but it also made the liquor more potent.

“I haven’t told this story to anyone, but you should know it because yesterday you accused me of fleeing from Egypt.”

“I apologize again.”

He bowed his head and said in a soft voice, as if talking to himself, “Please stop apologizing. I just want you to know me as I really am. For the last thirty years that I’ve lived in America, I haven’t forgotten Egypt for a single day.”

“Aren’t you happy with your life here?”

He looked at me as if trying to find the right words, and then he smiled and said, “Have you had any American fruits?”

“Not yet.”

“Here they use genetic engineering to make the fruit much larger and yet it doesn’t taste so good. Life in America, Nagi, is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless.”

“You’re saying that after all you’ve achieved?”

“All success outside one’s homeland is deficient.”

“Why don’t you go back to Egypt?”

“It’s difficult to erase thirty years of your life. It’s a difficult decision, but I’ve thought about it. The proposal I submitted was my first step toward going back, but they turned it down.”

He said the last few words bitterly, and I said, “It’s really sad for Egypt to lose people like you.”

“Perhaps you find this hard to understand because you’re still young. It’s like when a man loves a woman and gets very attached to her and then discovers that she is cheating on him: do you understand this kind of agony? To curse the woman and at the same time to love her and never be able to forget her — that’s how I feel toward Egypt. I love her and I wish to offer her all I’ve got, but she rejects me.”

I saw that his eyes were welling up with tears, so I leaned over and put my arm around him and bent over to kiss his head, but he gently pushed me away, saying as he tried to smile, “How about ending this melodrama?”