which itself solicited this balance so as to avoid coming to some foolish end that ran against the course of the tale. I had taken on his personality—scouting out locations, going over guard rosters, befriending and bonding with doormen and shopkeepers, making plans to burgle a target (getting in and out, making plan Bs)—enjoying the movement between two contradictory roles. I had regarded it as a chess match, but now I was playing on the primary board. I wasn’t selfish, though. I made sure to initiate certain friends into certain details, stressing that should these details find their way outside our gathering it would mean troubles there’d be no avoiding.
The loser toppled his king and for a few seconds we held him, pityingly, in our gaze. To us, the boards were kingdoms, with soldiers, rulers, and ministers. No one had the right to talk during a match. Brief, concise comments from an early leaver, if he had something worth saying. The moment the king fell, the murmurs would rise up: match analysis, the reasons for victory and defeat, replaying critical moves to avoid making the same mistakes, and, on the margins of it all, the study of openings and recently published books. Our stars. Our heroes. The senior chess players. Great minds denied their birthright, to take their place at the top board.
Ustaz Fakhri moved the café’s cheap board to a table behind him. Some of the pieces fell to the floor, and Lotfi rushed to help. The bishop lay by my foot, head nibbled by the passing years. I fought a powerful urge to stamp down on it and on Lotfi’s fingers, about to pick it up. Soon I’d be needing a visit to a psychologist to find out what lay behind these irrational urges.
Fakhri laid the Samsonite case across his thighs. His eyes narrowed and his thick eyebrows drew together. One of Satan’s avatars: sinister, bulging eyes, the heavy brows almost meeting in the middle, a face held taut by a hidden anger—but a passive devil, too idle to perform his duties; eschewing temptation.
He ran his fingers over the tumblers beside the locks on either side. We stared at him in apprehension and held our breath, waiting for the familiar click that proclaimed the treasure was to hand.
He’d once forgotten the numbers. All efforts to recall them had failed—the suggestion, gloatingly advanced by Anwar al-Waraqi, that he smash the case open had only left him tenser and more irritable. The way to the royal ivory pieces ran through him. We had suggested dozens of numbers based on important dates from his life—his birth, the day he met the king, his visit to Russia—but to no avail. He had asked to be left alone for a moment. The proprietor, Ashraf al-Suweifi, had made a gift to him of his own favorite corner, that he might be alone with his case—a great sacrifice, but the goal was greater still: the royal chess set, symbol of the café and its clientele. And Fakhri would not resort to smashing the case, for that would be an insult to his intelligence and his memory. He would rather the pieces remain imprisoned: an ill omen should it come to pass. It had taken half an hour of total silence before the trial came to an end.
“Want to play?”
I refused, pleading a headache. Ustaz Fakhri offered a game to Lotfi. Moved to the chair facing him, and gave him white straight out. Lotfi concealed his irritation at being thought a lesser player behind the smoke from his cigarette. Anwar al-Waraqi, sitting next to Lotfi, made no effort to conceal the derision on his face. Then he leaned forward to get closer to me:
“So?”
The only Egyptian who made sure to pronounce his Arabic letters properly, a habit he’d picked up living among the Arabs of the Gulf.
“The Egyptians are an idle people,” he would say, “So idle that they can’t be bothered to speak their language the right way.”
He pressed me to tell him about the latest developments in the case. This was his favorite game now. He wanted to leave Shubra for a better life, but he knew that what he sought was not simply a change in location but something that called for a different approach altogether, one that would help him acclimatize to his new environment. And in Mustafa Ismail’s story, he had found what he was looking for. But he needn’t have asked, for I could not free myself from Mustafa’s grip. I would pass on what I saw, in the hope of increasing the numbers of his admirers, carrying out his unspoken wish that his story be preserved against the authorities’ limitless capacity to erase what it wants of memory.
As I explained, Nabil al-Adl had made no secret of his surprise; nothing in his records could explain Mustafa’s violent transformation. Why would a university professor sacrifice all he had and turn to crime? And, more importantly, how and when did he come by the expertise that had made a legend of him? Money wasn’t the motive. He had enough of it, and his qualifications and abilities allowed him to get more in ways that would never have led him to this end. In any case, he didn’t seem hungry for cash. So what had led him to risk all that he’d achieved?
From his seat beside me, Ustaz Fakhri glanced reprovingly at me out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t need to concentrate on his game with Lotfi, but he wished to hear no more. A growing desire to provoke him came over me. I crossed one leg over another. Mustafa’s words filled me with a sense of greatness.
“The reasons are so diverse that they disappear, leaving the crime an act committed for its own sake. Simply put, when ‘safe’ methods fail to guide you to yourself, you have no choice but to try out a set of actions proscribed by convention. And all the dangers this path may bring are preferable to living and dying without discovering who you are. What is it people do, save wake, and sleep, and eat, and fuck?”
Nabil al-Adl had broken in: “And this list of actions is improved when we add steal and blackmail?”
“You view the crime through a filter that your job imposes on you. Such things do not apply to me. I am free of job titles and the need to comply. If you could only obtain your freedom, then we could discuss those actions that are categorized as forbidden, and our right to engage in them.’”
“That’s philosophy, not crime,” was Lotfi’s comment. His eyes were on Ustaz Fakhri: a transparent attempt to curry favor. His position didn’t satisfy him. His desire would bring him down. I had brought him along to help him restore his lost memories of poetry. His knowledge of chess went no further than the general outlines: the pawns, eight identical pieces, the first to be sacrificed. Move by move, the game revealed its secrets and his most salient memories returned, enabling a pawn to reach the far end of the board and be promoted into a thoroughly respectable rook patrolling the northern border of Fakhri’s kingdom. What now?
Long hours I would spend here, seated alongside Ustaz Fakhri, the café’s chief elder and a nationally ranked chess player. If some idiot back in the Sixties hadn’t barred him from traveling on the grounds that engaging with a hostile nation was forbidden, he would have been one of the international stars of the game. Fakhri and I were two sides of the same coin: father and son, as the rest of the group would joke. A resemblance that stemmed from our characters, and the stern countenances that sought to set the world at arm’s length. Two individuals from a now extinct stock who cared nothing for what went on around them: looking on and not getting involved. But I admit that Fakhri was an extreme case. I never fought for long and, full of regret for what I’d lost, would return to reality. He had lived his life without being prey, even for a moment, to such a feeling. He had seemed pitying when I informed him of my decision, and though I was careful to maintain our relationship and return to the old habits whenever time allowed, what had been broken was greater than any attempt to restore it.
A changeless backdrop. We bestowed but fleeting glances on the world. The glass blocked most of the sound, and what reached us did so purged of its degradation. If people only realized how beautiful they were when they shut their mouths. Fakhri had sat here for twenty years—every day except Fridays, which he would spend rambling about the city for hours, following this with a specially prepared meal and then bed. The walking cleared the cigarette smoke that clung to his lungs, and emptied his dreams of any unwonted words or deeds he had been forced to engage in. This was a program that admitted no outside participation; should it so happen—and it had happened many times—that he encounter one of the café’s customers, he would cut them dead without the slightest attempt to soften the blow. His acquaintances had grown accustomed to this. That the man should