Beer in the Snooker Club Read online

  ‘And here comes our revolutionary,’ Mounir’s mother said, ‘Nasser’s disciple.’ A fat, ugly, rich woman. ‘Aren’t you going to tell them to take our house and silver?’ She squeaked in laughter. Everyone else laughed mirthlessly. They were being served by eight servants, permanent staff. I was sitting next to my mother.

  ‘At least say hello to Mounir,’ she whispered, ‘you haven’t seen him for three years.’

  I started looking round the table for him. I gave him a glance but my eyes rested on the girl next to him. She had this unique, even, very light brown skin with a mass of auburn hair piled at the back of her head. Her eyelids were moist, I could see that from where I was sitting.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘That’s la fille Salva, my dear. Just back from Europe.’

  Her father and mother were there too; I had met them before. One of the richest Jewish families in Egypt – our Woolworths.

  ‘Long time no see,’ shouted Mounir. God, I thought; Long time no see!

  I looked at him and said hello.

  ‘How’s tricks, buddy? Sure will have some fun together soon, eh?’ And he winked.

  ‘Tout à fait américain,’ someone said, and ‘c’est mignon’ and ‘il est sympathique.’

  I kept my eyes on my plate, imagining that handsome idiot squirming in his seat. Now and again I gave the Salva girl a look; she always seemed to be smiling at Mounir.

  ‘Hey, Ram,’ he shouted to me again, ‘what’s that I hear about you being Red? Don’t fall for that stuff, buddy. I’ll give you some information’ll make you think.’

  I was neither Red, Pink, Blue, nor Black. I had no politics in me then. I didn’t consider the Egyptian revolution and getting rid of Farouk to be politics.

  ‘You do that,’ I said.

  ‘Believe me,’ he continued, and he was speaking to the whole table now, ‘American Democracy is the thing. Boy, you wanna see that country.’ Everyone was nodding at him wisely and contentedly. His American accent, whether intentional or not, added to his insipidness.

  ‘I was there and I saw for myself. Man, that’s the country for me. I tell you …’

  Two days earlier, I had been with a group of ‘freedom fighters’, all students, harassing the English troops at Suez. Three of my friends had died, and Font was lying in hospital with a bullet in his thigh.

  ‘… the Red menace … free enterprise …’ he went on, to the worthless admiration of the nodding seals there. ‘We sure must be vigilant,’ he said. ‘Look what happened to China.’

  I asked him what had happened to China. He didn’t know. He didn’t know there was any racial discrimination in America. He had never heard of Sacco and Vanzetti, he did not know what ‘un-American activities’ was. No, he did not believe there were poor Puerto Ricans or poor anyone else in America. Who was Paul Robeson? Red Indians without full citizenship? What was I talking about? I must be mad. All he knew was that he had spent three years in America, had picked up their pet phrases and had been given a degree. He was all set to be given high office, and what sickened me was the knowledge that he would get it. It made me sick because apart from Font and myself, all the other students dying at Suez were from poor families and Mounir and Co. were going to lord it over the survivors.

  ‘England,’ he said, ‘must stay at Suez and protect us from the Red Menace.’

  Politics or no politics, that was too much for me. I don’t remember what happened exactly; we came to blows and I told him to ‘wipe his backside’ with his American democracy. Of course my mother started crying, and the servants separated us, and even calling the police was suggested.

  I found myself in the street. Strangely, I was in a good mood. I even laughed when I remembered the way my aunt had shouted ‘murder, murder’. It was too late for the Pyramid Road tram-line, and I started walking the seven-mile journey home. My mother still had her car then, and I thought she might pick me up later on. I heard my name being called, but walked on without looking back. Then footsteps started running towards me.

  ‘Stop, blast you!’ she said.

  ‘What do you want,’ I asked, looking at the Salva girl.

  ‘Your mother tells you to take her car; here are the keys.’

  ‘How will she get back?’

  ‘My parents will drive her.’

  I started walking back with her.

  ‘I’m the daughter …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said. ‘You’re the rich Salva girl.’ I started the car.

  ‘Will you drive me home?’ she asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ she said, ‘I’ll get my handbag.’

  She returned a few minutes later and I drove for a while in silence. Suddenly I decided to go and visit Font. He had a private room, and I knew I could enter the hospital any time I wanted.

  ‘You live in Heliopolis, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  I went to our Zamalek flat first and asked her to wait in the car for a moment. Upstairs I collected two bottles of wine and two glasses; then I took another glass.

  ‘Why did you leave the party?’ I asked in the car.

  ‘Are you going to seduce me with this wine?’ she said, not answering my question. I told her about Font in hospital and that I wanted to tell him about what happened at my aunt’s.

  ‘Do you often go to Suez?’

  ‘I don’t, but Font is a regular.’

  ‘How old is Font?’ she asked.

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘You’re twenty-one also?’ I nodded.

  ‘I’m twenty-five,’ she said.

  She came with me to the hospital. No one saw us and we slipped quietly into Font’s room. I introduced him to Edna and opened the wine. Edna and I sat at the foot of Font’s bed, and I started to tell him about Mounir.

  ‘I was so happy when you hit him,’ Edna said.

  This surprised me. ‘I thought you were smiling at him all the time.’

  ‘I can’t stand him or any of the people there.’

  ‘Even your parents?’ I asked.

  ‘Particularly them.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ It was Font who asked.

  ‘A rich girl’s gimmick,’ I replied.

  ‘No,’ she said calmly, ‘it isn’t.’ And I believed her. That was the first time Edna made me ashamed of myself, because I knew that my own behaviour that day was not without the support of some kind of gimmick.

  Edna asked Font how he came to be wounded. We talked until dawn. We drank and laughed and were very careful not to mention Israel because Edna was Jewish. My hand accidentally touched hers and somehow it seemed natural that we hold hands for the rest of the night. The wine and the dawn and Edna’s beauty made me feel very much in love. It was a happy night.

  Font was discharged from hospital soon after that day when Edna and I went to see him. We began to meet Edna nearly every day. Sometimes she’d come and pick us up from the university by car, and we would drive for hours on the desert road to Alexandria. Font and I were shy people, and fundamentally very different from our old school friends – different in spite of sharing their taste for drink and gambling: we were bookworms. Font was living with my mother and myself then. Both his parents were dead and we had been friends since childhood. He had a small monthly allowance which he shared with me for books and expenses, while my mother paid for the household. We hadn’t arranged it that way, it just came naturally. We were such avid readers, we sometimes spent weeks on end without going out of my room, reading one book after another. I don’t remember ever discussing a book with Font. We just read.

  The only important thing which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution. We took to it wholeheartedly and naturally, without any fanaticism or object in view. The only time I was passionate about it was that day when I heard Mounir say the English should remain in Egypt. And, surprisingly, that was also the first time I had ever used my reading: rac
ial discrimination and incidents such as Sacco and Vanzetti, I had come across amongst the thousands of books I consumed. To someone of the opposite type to Mounir I could as well have talked about the murders of Karl Radek and the Polish revolutionaries. I read detachedly and was interested only in the stories as such.

  When Edna began talking to us of socialism or freedom or democracy, we always said yes, that’s what the Egyptian revolution was; everything good was going to be carried out by the revolution. To begin with Edna’s politics were not noticed by us at all, but gently she talked to us about oppressed people in Africa and Asia and even some parts of Europe, and Font and I started to read political books with more interest. The more we read, the more we wanted to learn and the more ignorant we felt. We learnt, for the first time, the history of British imperialism and why we didn’t want the British troops in the Suez Canal area. Up to then we had shouted ‘evacuation’ like everyone else, without precisely knowing why evacuation was so important. Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians.

  We started to feel dissatisfied with the university life we were leading. This did not make us work any harder. If we were not playing snooker or drinking beer, we were with Edna, and if neither of these, we were devouring political books.

  Edna and I were not lovers straight away. I had met too many Egyptian girls at the university who were vehement politicians and who considered a man’s physical approach with contempt, so loving Edna silently, I was afraid that she too would find it contemptible if I tried to make love to her. I started to pour some of my passion into politics. I later learnt that a man who has passion in his politics is usually attractive to women.

  It was Edna who introduced me to Egyptian people. It is rare, in the milieu in which I was born, to know Egyptians. She explained to me that the Sporting Club and the race meetings and the villa-owners and the European-dressed and – travelled people I met, were not Egyptians. Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land.

  She took me one day to a flat her father owned near old Cairo. It was the first of many trips, bare-foot and in peasant dress, to the poor districts of Cairo and to the little villages in the outskirts. That first day, she made me sit Arab fashion on the floor and told me to comb her hair. She sat in front of me and took some hair-pins out. Her hair fell down to her waist and I combed it and plaited it, then tied the plaits with strings. On the bed were the peasant clothes we were to wear.

  ‘Are you sad?’ she asked without turning her head.

  ‘A little bit.’ It was that calm sadness which … well, which comes over you if you are combing the hair of the woman you love and if you don’t feel good enough for her.

  ‘Now we must wear these clothes,’ she said without moving.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Do you mind if I undress in front of you?’

  ‘Don’t, Edna.’

  ‘Why?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Is it because you love me?’

  I stared at the nape of her neck in silence.

  ‘I am four years older than you.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  After a while she asked me if I were as naïve as I appeared to be. I bent forward and kissed her neck. ‘I am not naïve,’ I whispered, ‘but I am clumsy because I love you.’

  ‘Say it again,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you love me.’

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  Unconsciously, all the books we had read, political and otherwise, began to be more than just interesting reading to Font and me. Edna had read nearly as much as we had, and under her influence we began to talk about what we had read.

  The world of ice and snow in winter and red, slanting roof-tops was beginning to call us. The world of intellectuals and underground metros and cobbled streets and a green countryside which we had never seen, beckoned to us. The world where students had rooms, and typists for girl-friends, and sang songs and drank beer in large mugs, shouted to us. A whole imaginary world. A mixture of all the cities in Europe; where pubs were confused with zinc bars and where Piccadilly led to the Champs-Elysées; where miners were communists and policemen fascists; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone called the ‘landlady’; where there were Grand Hotels and Fiat factories and bull-fighting; where Americans were conspicuous and anarchists wore beards and where there was something called the ‘Left’; where Christopher Isherwood’s German family lived, where the Swedes had the highest standard of living and where poets lived in garrets and there were indoor swimming-pools.

  I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and to be a political leader and to win at Monte Carlo and to be down-and-out in London and to be an artist and to be elegant and also to be in rags.

  It was the last day before the summer holidays; all the well-to-do were going to Alexandria. Font and I were waiting for Edna near the university gate.

  ‘Here we are,’ Font said, ‘the beginning of the three months, the crowded beaches and showing-off. All the “family” girls expecting a platonic love affair and all the young men polishing their moustaches and parading on the sea-shore. The gambling and the young men driving their cars and the night-clubs and the boasting about imaginary affairs. The coloured shirts and trousers for the girls. The same old thing and all empty … no life.’

  I agreed. ‘Life’ was in Europe.

  I don’t know whether Edna had made up her mind a long time before, but unexpectedly she came out with a plan to take us to England for three months. I had never been able to penetrate very deeply into her thoughts. Why she befriended Fond and myself and initiated us into politics and was having an affair with me, I could not guess, and at the time did not think about it. Perhaps it was because the three of us had had an English education and spoke in English, perhaps she was lonely, perhaps she considered it her social duty to do all this. She never told me she loved me, and if she had, I would not have believed her. I imagined Edna loving a strong-willed, sober man dedicated to something noble which she respected, and I was very far from being any of these things. Perhaps she liked me because of that incident at my aunt’s the first time we met, but she was too intelligent not to see it had been partly an act. Anyhow, she proposed taking us to England at her expense.

  Someone wants to travel. If he has no passport, he gets one. He fills an application form, presents his birth-certificate and one or two other papers, and in a few days’ time he is given a passport. It is his birthright. It was the passports which started Font off on being puzzled, before he even reached Tilbury. It took us three months and one day to get our passports. For the three months we were on our own, and no amount of papers and excuses and pulling strings and explaining could yield us our passports. Then we met an old friend of ours whose father was well placed in the army. In the one day we obtained two passports simply by giving him two pictures each. He also got us exit-visas in half an hour.

  ‘You’d think we were criminals or something’ Font told me, ‘imagine needing a visa to leave the country. It’s disgusting. And then, after three months of useless toil, a man obtains it in half an hour. To think I go and risk my life in Suez every now and then for a country where strings still have to be pulled.’

  ‘Give them time, Font. They’ve only been a very short time in power.’

  ‘It’s not a short time,’ he answered. Later, it was Font himself who found excuses for such things. ‘Less than one per cent of the population have the urge to, can, or have to leave the country. This democratic sophistry of a right to have a passport is all right in a country where eighty per cent of the population isn’t half starving. So what, if this one per cent is restricted?’ But that wasn’t
yet; at this time his ‘education’ was still at its primary stage.

  I wrote a letter from England once, some years later, to someone in Eypt telling him not to send his son to an English school. If his son was one of those who swallowed what they were told, he would one day be disgusted. At school Font and I had been among the very few who ‘swallowed’. We said ‘this isn’t cricket’, and didn’t smoke with our school blazers on because we had ‘promised’ not to do so. We had been implanted with an expectation of ‘fair play’ from the English. This stupid thing of expecting ‘fair play’ from the English, alongside their far from ‘fair play’ behaviour, was a Strange phenomenon in us. Perhaps in our subsequent outcries against the English, there was the belief that if they knew that what they were doing wasn’t fair play, they would stop it. In spite of all the books we had read demonstrating the slyness and cruelty of England’s foreign policy, it took the Suez war to make us believe it. Of course the Africans and the Asians had had their Suezes a long time before us … over and over again. I say this now, because of what happened when we tried to get entry visas for England.

  Having obtained our passports and our exit visas, we hurried to the British consulate for our British visas. Egyptians were then travelling to England, and Britons to Egypt, the situation at Suez had eased and there was talk of a settlement. We filled two application forms.

  ‘Which school did you go to?’ a clerk asked. We told him.

  ‘You’re only going for a visit?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He came back ten minutes later and told us he was very sorry, but he couldn’t give us our visas.

  We went to see the headmaster of the school we had matriculated from. We had been fond of him as a person. He telephoned the consulate and spoke to a friend of his to see why we had been refused visas.