My father was weak and as a result his life ended in total defeat. But despite his failure and his weakness, I liked him. I liked him because he accepted his defeat with the silence of one who knows the rules. He didn’t fill the world with lament and he didn’t turn into a poisonous insect. On the occasion of a major competition, my father would await the result among the other competitors, and, when he found out that he’d lost and someone else had won, he wouldn’t express astonishment or anger but carefully gather his things together, smiling sadly, and then make haste to catch the last bus and, if he felt comfortable with the passenger sitting next to him, would tell him everything that had happened, in a neutral tone of voice. His neighbor would listen to him, at first with pity, but then some small thing—such as my father’s shoes or his shirt or even an expression that passed over his face—would cause him to understand why he had failed and the man would feel less, or even not at all, sorry.
Lots of people spent their evenings at our house. There were many names belonging to people of differing professions and ages. As some disappeared through travel, or death, new faces appeared. Despite their differences, they were joined by a common thread: all were major unfinished works. El-Ghamdi was a teacher of Arabic language who had once hoped to be a poet. Muhammad Irfan was a former Marxist who had abandoned his dream of changing the world and made do with arts journalism; he made up news items about dancers and singers and blackmailed them. Even ‘Uncle’ Anwar I discovered from my father, had dreamed of being a great songwriter and had ended up playing backing zither to the dancer called Sugar. And there were many others. A band of people with shattered dreams, like old people carping at a wedding, who met every evening to curse blind luck and the lousy times: “We knew So-and-so when he used to pray God for the price of a cigarette, and now he’s got more money than he knows what to do with, with a villa in el-Maadi, a chalet in el-Agami, and three luxury cars. And So-and-so, the famous singer—didn’t he fail the radio test in the fifties? You can believe that story because I was a member of the committee!” When I sat with my father’s friends, I never felt for an instant that they loved one another. They feuded all the time and violent quarrels were always breaking out among them. Nevertheless, they took care to come and never broke with one another because what joined them was stronger than their enmity. They needed these gatherings, because at them their sense of inadequacy was dissolved in their awareness of their common fate, and when they met none of them was embarrassed by his failure.
I would use any excuse to escape from sitting with them and only stay up late with them if Uncle Anwar was present. Uncle Anwar was different. He was my father’s closest friend, the two of them joined by thirty years of friendship. Once they had lived together in a single room on Bein el-Sarayat, my father dreaming of painting, Anwar of music. Anwar earned a lot from his work with Sugar and spent lavishly on himself and his friends. He had never married because marriage, in his opinion, gave you the blues and the blues shortened your life. Uncle Anwar was nice. He never stopped making fun of things and stirring those around him to laughter. On what he called ‘nights of joy,’ which were those following the wedding of some rich person, Uncle Anwar would appear in the circle bearing ‘goodies’—a big bottle of brandy, an ounce of goodquality hashish, and a kilo of kebab and sweetbreads, and when his friends received him with cheers, Uncle Anwar would affect a grave face, throw down in front of them the things that he had brought, and pronounce, in the tones of a strict father, “Eat and drink until a white thread can be distinguished against the black hides of your miserable fathers!”*
Uncle Anwar hated nobody so much as he hated Sugar, the dancer, against whom he directed the greater part of his jokes and calumniations. Sometimes, even, when conversation had dried up and silence reigned, one of those present would ask Anwar for news of his mistress and Anwar would launch into a virtuoso display of sarcasm at the expense of Sugar’s ignorance, arrogance, rich lovers, and general awfulness, and the place would ring with laughter once more. Despite Anwar’s imperious love of music, he would go whole nights without playing, refusing immediately and roughly if anyone asked him to do so, and if anyone insisted, a fight would sometimes break out. Anwar’s friends knew how he was and so didn’t ask him, knowing that, at a given moment, which no one could predict, Anwar would suddenly stretch out his hand, take the zither, put on the plectra, and start to play. If one contemplated his face after a few minutes of playing, it would seem that he could no longer see the audience or make out his surroundings. When Anwar finished, he would receive the shouts of admiration and the applause with a face drawn and pale and he’d remain like that for a while before resuming his unruliness and sarcasm, at which point we’d know that he’d returned.
There are no weddings on Tuesdays. Uncle Anwar would show up early, the first to arrive, his face still bearing the traces of sleep and battered by the din of the previous night’s show. He would greet my mother politely and make his way to the studio. There, he would remove his suit, hang it up carefully, and put on his gallabiya (Uncle Anwar always kept one of his gallabiyas at our house). After a little while my father would come. They would drink tea together and then sit on the floor and busy themselves preparing the equipment for the evening. They began with the goza, or hand-held waterpipe, the cleaning and readying of which were important tasks that kept both Anwar and my father busy and often gave rise to arguments. My father might be of the opinion that it was the pieces of thick paper used to tighten the joints that were impeding the flow of the smoke, while Anwar might claim that it was the reed stem that was blocked. I used to watch them—Anwar in his striped gallabiya, seated cross-legged and tearing up little pieces of paper that he would stuff between the stem of the waterpipe and the tobacco bowl and my father next to him, repeatedly puffing into the mouthpiece of the reed and listening to how the water gurgled. When they came to Cairo thirty years before, two young artists full of determination and ambition, had it ever occurred to them that things would turn out like this? How distant the beginning seemed now and how strange the end! Usually it was Anwar who was the cleverer at diagnosing the goza’s problems and when he’d finished placing the tightening wads, he’d light a bowl of tobacco to test it and draw a long breath, which would be followed by a fierce fit of coughing that turned his eyes red. Then he’d pass the pipe over to my father, saying, “I told you it was the wads. They’re dandy now. Take a drag and ask the Lord to bless me,” and my father would look in my direction and say laughingly, before thrusting the mouthpiece into his mouth, “Your Uncle Anwar, see, before the music, used to work as a goza mechanic on Bein el-Sarayat,” and Anwar would burst out with, “Don’t say such things, you son of a bitch! You want Isam to get funny ideas about me?”* Then he’d turn to me, an injured expression on his face, and say, “Don’t you believe a word your father says, Master Isam! I’ve been an honest man all my life. It was your father who taught me to smoke hashish and at the beginning I thought it was chocolate.”
A hail of jokes and quips would then be released, after which Anwar’s face would suddenly resume its serious expression and he’d stand up and thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket where it hung on the wall and take out a piece of hashish wrapped in cellophane and hand it to my father who would sniff it, try it with his teeth, squeeze it between his fingers, and proclaim it to be, “Sweet, Anwar! Mustafa’s? What do you say? Should we wait for the rest or start with a solo?”
Anwar would sit down cross-legged again and say in tones of the utmost seriousness, “Let’s start with a solo in the mode Sika.”*
He would bite the hashish into little pieces which he would distribute among the pipe bowls of molasses-soaked tobacco, then light the charcoal, and set to smoking right away. They’d ask me to stay with them and I’d sit and smoke with them, and after a few pipes the drug would go to Anwar’s head, his puffy eyelids would droop, a grave expression would appear in his eyes, and he’d nod his head as though following an inner dialogue that none but he could hear. Then he’d turn to my father, smile, pat him on his thick leg, and say, “Honestly, my dear Mr. Abduh, don’t you think you should have given up all this painting business? You could have learned to be a belly dancer. What’s wrong with belly dancing? By now you’d be something of a different order entirely. Old Woman Sugar does this (here Anwar