Flickering Light

 

Mansoura Ez Eldin

Translated by: Paul Starkey

I seemed to be walking in another city. The streets were covered in a gentle darkness. Although it was midday, pallid people were hurrying quickly on, without looking back. I wanted to stop one of them but he didn’t take any notice of me, so I wrapped my grey overcoat around my body, listening to a husky sound welling up inside me.

At last I found it . . . an old bar on the ground floor of a building designed in the Belgian style. I stepped inside, to be greeted by a dim light given out by a few candles placed in niches that were spaced at equal intervals along the wall.

The barman with a thick moustache gave me a searching look, then continued a terse conversation with someone sitting in front of him at the bar.

I chose a seat near the enormous gramophone and rested my elbow on the table. It was made, like the other tables in the place, in the shape of an enormous, irregular tree trunk. My attention was gripped by the bar, with its tree trunks and flickering candles, until I became aware of a bulky hand covered in hair putting a bottle of wine and a crystal glass in front of me.

The hand withdrew as quickly as it could. I couldn’t touch it. I pulled out my wallet, counted what was in it and found I had a reasonable amount of money. I put it on the table and pretended to look at my right palm, avoiding the eyes of the enormous waiter who was standing between two of the niches in the wall staring at me.

The bulky hand came back again, poured some wine into the glass and went away. I interpreted the last movement as an order to drink so brought the glass to my mouth and began to sip the contents. For a brief moment I was confused, undecided whether it was wine or something else, but I pressed on mechanically drinking one glass after another until I had finished the whole bottle.

Then I noticed the barman whispering something to the man with his back to me at the bar. He walked over in my direction and sat down opposite me, scrutinising me with narrow eyes whose colour I could not make out. He made a cryptic gesture to the waiter standing between the two niches in the wall facing me, who walked off in a huff.

Faced with a deafening silence from the man at the bar, I didn’t dare to speak. In fact, I thought that I had lost the power of speech entirely. Suddenly, he came up to me, pulled my overcoat from me, followed by my black jacket, undid the buttons on my blouse and stretched out his fingers towards my shoulder. He pressed the scar on it. “I’ve got one exactly like that,” he said.

He took off the jacket he was wearing and I noticed a speck of dark blood sitting there in the middle of his white shirt, whose colour had changed. He pulled up his sleeve and took hold of a sharp knife that had been lying in front of me from the start without my noticing.

He touched the scar on his arm with the edge of the knife and immediately pressed down hard with it. He continued pressing on the knife as he brought it down along his arm. A thread of dark blood appeared. He was so absorbed in his work that I doubted whether he heard the sound of my screams.

I began to grip my arm, writhing from the intensity of the pain. A terrifying mist came over my eyes. My eyelids closed against my will and I tried unsuccessfully to open them . . . my voice turned into the meowing of a cat exposed to some unbearable agony. 

Eventually, I could see the things around me again: tables in the shape of tree trunks revolving around themselves . . . a sharp knife quivering with drops of congealed blood on it and candles flickering anxiously. I got dressed slowly and went out.

(There is a rock in the shape of a strong, masculine face. I was leaning against it with my arms folded in front of me. Behind me was a fence made from sticks of cane that I thought I had planted.

At the top of a gentle incline, the sand was burning. I began to alternately put my weight on one foot and raise the other. After a little, I smelled the aroma of roasting meat. I cursed the hot sand and said: “Perhaps it’s the smell of my flesh.” There was a mirror blocking the horizon between him and me but despite that I noticed him, sprawled out in a heap the other side of it. At the same time, I could see him beside my reflection. There was a sharp nose, narrow, cunning eyes and an untidy beard. Then the hair on his head began to grow faster so that it almost reached his waist, and his eyes turned a blue colour and grew wider in his face. His wooden features and unkempt beard fascinated me.)

A solitary man was making his way from one cheap bar to another, coughing violently, lighting a cigarette from the one before without caring that his lungs had turned into a rusty filter. At first, I had been walking one pace ahead of him, aware of him behind me, driving me senseless as he watched my every move. Then the positions were reversed and he started to walk in front of me, with me watching him, following his blurred image wherever he went. I would wake to find myself suffering from a terrible headache, his hoarse voice ringing in my ears with no respite. I would run to the mirror to see whether he had taken me over or not, then calm down again when I saw my own blue eyes facing me.

The last moments in the old bar were mingled in my consciousness with ghostly things. I was overpowered by evil thoughts that I had to suppress.

I stopped in front of the Belgian-style building, hesitating whether or not to go in. A strange silence had taken hold of the place . . . a young woman in clothes that seemed to date from the fifties hid herself away quickly in the entrance to the building next door. From a window, a young girl of about nine peered out. Her eyes fastened on my face and I felt myself become more and more tense.

Inside, the place was devoid of any sign of life. Dust covered the walls and floors. In the corners, spiders had tirelessly spun their webs. I did not despair. Ten days later, I walked again along the same streets until I arrived, walked into the bar, and was greeted by the dim candlelight. There was a man sitting at the bar. He exchanged a few short phrases with the barman with the thick moustache, then came over to me.

I passed him the knife that was lying on the table and stretched out my bare left arm for him, hiding my face with my other hand.

From the anthology "Unbuttoning the Violin".. Banipal Books 2006.