The Book of Safety. Yasser Abdel Hafez
He would gloatingly declare that Mustafa’s mind couldn’t cope with the perversity of his thoughts. He asked me to look into his claims and redraw that missing boundary line, which is why he never bothered looking for Amgad al-Douqli. However, I believed that the truth of Mustafa’s tale, its entire value, rested on al-Douqli and his hideout in the heart of the desert—it was the key to the man—and so I began my private quest to locate it.”
“And?”
We were in a Chinese restaurant in Cairo’s Heliopolis district, empty but for us. It was a boast of al-Waraqi’s that he knew somewhere to go on every street in Heliopolis. He was talking of how his father had had the opportunity to upgrade his business activities and the lives of his children. He’d been offered a printing press for a trifling sum in the Seventies, but hadn’t wanted to leave Shubra.
“Shubra’s the sea and I’m a fish,” he had said. “I could never leave.”
Al-Waraqi never tired of sighing over the chance let slip.
“I could have been something else altogether, God forgive him. A fish! What a metaphor, I ask you. . . . The Abdel-Nasser generation drove him out of his senses.”
“Topographically speaking, you’d have trouble comparing Shubra to the sea. Maybe you’ve noticed how its streets all run south to north. I mean, it’s more accurate to compare it to a river.”
He knocked back what was left in his wine glass and rode roughshod over what I’d said, as though he hadn’t heard, ordering another bottle from the young waiter leaning over him.
The rice: lost in its own dazzling whiteness.
“They steam it. Very healthy.”
Given the way he gobbled it down, ‘healthy’ seemed like a stretch. His presence was at odds with everything about the restaurant, down to the smallest detail: the staff with their contrived air of politeness, the pair of scrupulously carved red dragons, the color scheme of vivid but inoffensive crimson and yellow, the soft music pitched for murmuring patrons. I was suddenly struck by revulsion at what he stood for, his hopes and dreams of social elevation. I still hadn’t learned to read a letter before opening it. As Ustaz Fakhri had once advised me, justifying his driving a café regular from his chair:
“Never expect good things from a man whose smile never leaves his lips.”
An odd reason to commit an unkindness against someone who seemed civil enough, but seated with al-Waraqi I longed to be able to love and hate based on motives like these. I waited for Dutch courage to come, but wine is the same as masturbation: the illusion of ecstasy, then the letdown.
*
Even going out into the desert with Amgad al-Douqli and his driver, my doubts accompanied me. The Saqqara pyramid was the last thing I could make out. After that, it was all desert with no landmarks to tell one part from the next. Yet the dark-skinned driver, his master’s equal in decrepitude, drove the powerful, fitted-out car with the self-confident prescience of Zarqa, blue-eyed sibyl of ancient Nejd, and did not give in to my attempts to draw him out of his silence. He slid in a cassette at al-Douqli’s request, a ponderous symphony by Haydn with no choral parts. It was among the most beautiful pieces the Santa Cecilia Orchestra had ever played, he said, and I was lucky: his son had sent it to him just yesterday from England, where he lived. Enkland—he pronounced it as the Arabs did, with the ‘k,’ and made it sound like a country he had been the first to discover. The melancholy music and the vast tan expanse around us woke within me an obscure fear. Maybe I was getting involved in something I lacked the ability to deal with. What if he was Mustafa’s partner, and the Lotus House a warehouse for their ill-gotten gains and a tomb for the curious?
Eyes closed, he nodded his head faintly in time. He appeared to have nothing to do with crime, but my work had taught me that those who seem furthest from it are often the closest. Mustafa again:
The one you discount is precisely the one you’re after.
If he decided to murder me, then nobody would find out what had become of me, and who would care? Or notice? Huda might have tried if I’d shown her a little love, but her limited intelligence would make her of no use. Her search would stop at the little gang in the café, who’d persuade her that each of us has a journey that he or she must make.
I distracted myself from the fear by indulging my despair at a loneliness more profound than that of Fakhri. His choices in life (though I mocked them) had at least, I now decided, been made of his own free will, and were not guided by the will of others as mine were.
Most of what Mustafa had said was true. From afar, the flower appeared vast and golden, the sunlight reflecting off its petals and burning like a shard of fire. A lair for indulging lusts or the symbol of some secret cult. Having opened the iron gate for us and let the massive chain drop with a clang, the driver returned to the vehicle. Al-Douqli ordered him to stay there, saying that we wouldn’t be long—an order that inflamed my curiosity.
We had to duck to pass through a little door which was initially impossible to make out. Al-Douqli let me enter first so that I could help him through. To conceive of a place like this, set out here in the lifeless wastes, would have been impossible. Bewitched by the sight, my mind drifted and I failed to notice the crutch held out for me to grasp. Al-Douqli was forced to shout, poor fellow. We wandered about for a few minutes while he explained to me about the machine that managed the irrigation: pipes, reaching out underground to a subterranean reservoir, supplied the plants with the water they required at prescribed times. It was a system set up to run for years without need of human intervention.
“The only problem is that it’s going to turn into a jungle.”
And in something phrased close to an apology, as he clipped the leaves of plants that had spilled over the lip of their planter and onto the ground, he added, “The whole thing’s starting to wear me down.”
Did the house close up on itself at sunset and reopen in the morning? Were there glowing larvae? He laughed for a long time when I asked him, but gave no answer, leading me to believe that at night some miracle took place which no one but Mustafa had seen.
Anwar al-Waraqi tipped what was left of the wine into our glasses, moving the bottle back and forth between them in an attempt to serve us equal measures. He showed excessive interest in the final drop, which stubbornly refused to fall into his glass. He didn’t want what he was about to say to come across as an order.
“No getting around it, things happen in real life that are hard to believe. Just days ago, I saw a djinn leaving a girl’s body. I don’t mean the usual cliché, that she started speaking in tongues—I mean exactly what I say: after the sheikh had held negotiations to convince the demon to set her free, her body lurched upright and out stepped this weird figure. Just like us, but somehow see-through.”
He laughed.
“The spitting image of your friend Fakhri. An extraordinary resemblance! So similar that I thought the fellow who sits with us at the café must be a djinn himself. No way could that be a man. You won’t believe me, but at the same time you must understand that people no longer believe in fiction and they don’t value it. Aren’t you literary types always saying that reality’s now stranger than fiction? So make do with reality. All I ask is that you amend the introduction so it’s in keeping with what people expect from a book like this. After that, you write what you want.”
Getting the timing right is the most important step in the whole operation. The plan can be perfect, the victim ideal, and then the timing ruins everything.
Though the issue of timing can never be inflexible, there are rules on which one can base one’s calculations, at least most of the time.
The best time during the working week: between ten a.m. and twelve noon (when attendance for public and private employment is at its height).
The best season: winter.
The best day: Friday in summer.
Mustafa