a well-known artist and al-Ahram pays him eight hundred pounds a month. Even if he turned in a few scribbles, no one could say anything. No, what matters is that Shakir thinks he’s a great artist and if you run into him at the Journalists’ Syndicate he pretends not to know you, or he’ll remember you after a while and say, ‘My dear friend! Please excuse me, but you’ve changed a lot and you know what my mind’s like!’ Of course, he doesn’t try that stuff with me, of all people. He comes right over to me and minds his manners.”
I couldn’t stand it any more so I jumped up. My father seemed taken aback. There was a moment of silence. Then he got up from his chair and said as he turned to go out, just as though we’d just come to the end of an ordinary conversation on an ordinary night,
“Right. Well, I’ll leave you to get some sleep. Good night.”
He took some steps toward the door. I hung my head and looked at the interwoven colors of the design on the carpet and for a moment was overcome by an obscure feeling that my father hadn’t left the room and that he’d come over to me—and when I raised my eyes, there he was standing in front of me, and he stretched out his hand without speaking, put it on my shoulder, looked at me for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, Isam.”
When your father is a weak sick old man who clings onto your hand as you walk down the street next to him, leaning his weight on you for fear of falling over, and the passersby stare at your father’s infirmity and examine you with curious glances that come to rest on your face, how are you likely to feel? You may feel embarrassed at your father’s weakness and you may exaggerate your display of concern so as to garner appreciative looks, or you may talk nastily and cruelly to him because you love him and are sad for his sake and you want him to go back to being the way he was, strong and capable.
Life comes out on Wednesdays and I went to the news vendor in front of the mosque to buy it but he didn’t know of it, and I went to another vendor, in Giza Square, and to a third, and a fourth, and I took a bus to Suleiman Pasha Square and went to the big newsstand there and when the vendor approached me I asked him with a show of indifference, “Have you ever heard of a magazine called Life?”
I spoke to him like this because every time a vendor denied the existence of the magazine for which my father drew, I felt embarrassed and sad. I was expecting that this one wouldn’t know it either and my seemingly indifferent question reduced my embarrassment and placed me and the vendor on the same side—as though I too, in spite of my question, was denying that any such magazine existed. The vendor, however, and to my surprise, knew it and said, “Fifteen piasters.”
I felt relieved and paid the price, and I took the magazine and searched on the last page until I found my father’s name. There was a small square with, at the bottom, the signature “Abd el-Ati.” On the way home, I studied the cartoon. When I got to the house it was two o’clock in the afternoon and my father was still asleep, so I opened the door to his room and entered quietly. Then I swept aside the heavy black curtains and light flooded the space. My father opened his eyes and noticed me, and I said, smiling, “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Isam. What time is it?”
I told him the time and he yawned, stretched his hand out to the bedside table, picked up a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and took a drag that turned into a fit of coughing. I took up a chair, came close, and sat myself in front of him, the magazine in my hand. Tapping it, I said, laughing, “Happy now, my dear sir? That cartoon you did today almost got me sent to the police station!”
Taken aback, my father asked what I meant, so I told him, “No big deal. I got into a fight with a friend of mine over what the cartoon meant.” As I said this I straightened the edge of the carpet with my foot so that I seemed to be speaking about something quite incidental and ordinary that happened all the time.
“Good heavens! You got into a fight?” my father asked me in amazement.
“I want to ask you first. The man in the cartoon today, isn’t he supposed to be Anwar Sadat?”
My father responded, “Yes. Absolutely.”
I let out my breath as though relieved and said, “So I was right.”
My father pulled himself up, rested his back against the head of the bed, and said, worry starting to appear in his eyes, “What’s the story?”
“No big deal. As you know, they read Life at the university, so every Wednesday I have to have this quarrel with my friends. They all look at your cartoon and then they keep pestering me with questions about ‘Does your father mean So-and-so or So-and-so?’ Today, especially, if the drawing hadn’t been Anwar Sadat, the meaning would have changed completely.”
My father asked me, as he put on his glasses and looked anxiously at the drawing, “Aren’t the features clear?”
I answered emphatically, “Of course. They’re very clear. But this friend of mine, he’s a communist and you know what adolescents the communists are. He insists you’re a rightist and would never attack Sadat in your cartoons.”
Thus I initiated a long discussion with my father on a topic over which we always disagreed, and which I knew well, even though he sometimes got angry with me and attacked me, made him happy. And in the evening, my father would complain about me to his friends, telling them about his discussion with me and describing me as being—like all my generation—irritable and conceited, and then insert rapidly into the middle of what he was saying, “Just imagine, everyone! Isam tells me that they read Life at the university and that his colleagues got into a fight with him over today’s cartoon.”
Having slipped this sentence in, my father would quickly finish what he was saying, and I could almost feel his anxiety lest anyone disagree with him or call him a liar.
It was summer and Ramadan, and the university was on vacation. Neither I nor my father fasted but we respected my mother’s feelings and observed the Ramadan regime—breaking fast at sunset, eating again before sunrise. I had spent the night with my friends at el-Fishawi’s café, which was crowded and noisy, and returned to the house at three in the morning. My father and mother were seated at the table. My mother was eating her predawn meal and my father was busy devouring a plate of cookies, with tea. I divined, from the looseness of his lips, his vacant look, and the way the crumbs dribbled onto his gallabiya, that he had been smoking hashish. I exchanged a few words with them in passing, then went into my room, and leafed through the newspapers for the coming day, which I had bought in el-Hussein. Then I slept and woke up in the morning to find someone frantically shaking my body. I opened my eyes and found my mother beating her cheeks and pulling at me to get up. I ran after her to my father’s room. He lay naked on the bed and looked as though he was asleep, except that a mumbling sound was coming from his mouth and a feeble movement made his huge body tremble. There was an expression on his face that looked as though he was being pursued by a nightmare from which he was trying, unsuccessfully, to awake. My mother wailed out, “See your father, Isam!”
She bent over him, took him in her arms, and started calling to him. Then she buried her face in his chest and burst into tears. In an hour, the doctor came and, after examining my father carefully, bent down to me and informed me in a whisper that he had suffered an aneurysm. He advised me to take him immediately to the hospital, asked for twenty pounds, which he thrust into his pocket with thanks, and left. The ambulance workers exerted huge efforts with my mother before managing to get my father dressed in a white gallabiya and then they placed him on the stretcher and took him down the stairs, my mother and I behind them. As they took my father through the entryway of the building, Huda, our young maid, suddenly appeared and, with her skinny, nervy body and flying pigtail, started running after the stretcher and leaping round it and screaming.
In the light of the lamp suspended over the bed in the hospital, my father’s face seemed to me to be divided into two halves, one with a bulging eye, opened as far as it could go and blood-shot, and the other defeated and sagging. My father was trying to speak and a vague, suppressed, rattling sound emerged from within him. My mother left me with him and went to ask the hospital administration about something. In the afternoon,